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Credits |
Product:
The Longest Journey
Company: Funcom/Empire Interactive
Website: http://www.longestjourney.com
Estimated Street Price: �29.99
Review By: Byron Hinson
The Features
Point and click
adventures are slowly becoming a thing of the past, which is a little
worrying to me as I am one of their biggest fans. Adventure titles are
moving into full 3D (Monkey Island 4 for example) but have so far had
little impact in terms of sales, one of the best adventures in the past
year or so - Grim Fandango managed to blend 3D/2D graphics together to
produce an excellent point and click adventure, but very few people
actually ended up buying it which is a real shame.
Now we have "The
Longest Journey" by Funcom again trying to blend 2D and 3D graphics
together to produce a more advanced point and click adventure. Here are
some of the features: * Over 150 locations
spanning two distinct and detailed worlds Installation
And Settings The Longest Journey comes packed across 4
CD's. Installation is very easy, if a little long winded due to the large
size of the game and the amount of information it has to install onto your
PC. There are choices of small, medium and the massive full install of
over 1 Gigabyte of space. If you have a fast enough PC you probably don't
need to go the full hog and install the full installation as the medium
install does the job just as well. Once the game is installed auto play
starts up and you get a number of choices to choose from before starting
the game. They are: So it is now time to click on
Play....when you have done this, you are greeted with a number if new
options that setup the graphics in the game, first is to choose your
graphics card (G400 in my case), Color depth (32 Bit here) and enable 3D
acceleration. The
Gameplay The Longest Journey is a point and click
adventure, if you have ever played Grim Fandango, Monkey Island etc then
you'll know exactly what I am talking about. You play the part of April, a
young student who has been having bad dreams and it is up to you to find
out exactly what these dreams mean and why you are having them. The
Longest Journey is full of logical puzzles and a massive amount of speech
and the great thing is - there are no action orientated parts in the game,
it is just pure adventuring. The game is split up into chapters of which
there are 13, (Beginning with a short prologue which you play through)
each chapter ends once you have completed a certain amount of puzzles. The
Longest Journey is pretty large and isn't a game you are going to complete
in one weekend of playing. The Longest Journey manages to combine 3D
movement very well compared to one of the first ventures in to 3D point
and click adventures, Grim Fandango, there is very little sign of
characters getting stuck in places and movement is all done via the mouse
with no keyboard or joypad interaction necessary. The only concern I had
on the gameplay side was the fact that some of the conversations did tend
to go on a bit too long early on in the game, but that kind of thing
stopped bothering me the more I got into the story. Graphics,
Sound & Music What can I say, The Longest Journey is
gorgeous to look at right
from the start. It manages to blend 3D and 2D pre-rendered backgrounds
very well and the style is excellent throughout. Almost every location is
detailed, animated and full of other characters going about their
business. A number of locations scroll along the further you walk to the
edge of the screen and the way in which the background and foregrounds
move is excellently handled. The 3D characters are very well animated
and beautifully detailed, but as is the problem with games that only run
in 640x480 (Not too bad in adventures) the 3D can get a little blocky the
further the characters are away from the screen. Thankfully though, you
get so engrossed in the game you don't really notice. Cutscenes crop up
during the game too - and these are superbly done and you hardly notice
them as they hardly ever take longer than a millisecond to load up and
they also don't go on for ages like in some games...These cutscenes are
just right and again they are wonderful to look at. As I mentioned earlier - The Longest
Journey is packed full of hours of speech all of which is very well acted
out, especially by the woman who does the voice of the main character
April. Orchestral music plays in the background in many scenes, although
there isn't quite as much music as I would have liked to have heard during
the game, sound effects are again excellent, from the running water to the
sound of the subways. Final
Comments I have been playing The
Longest Journey every day since it arrived here for review and I can
safely say that anyone who likes point and click adventures with great
stories will love the game just as much as I do. Point and click
adventures don't get much better than this. DVD TV Player - Pioneer DV-626D
* More than 70 speaking characters
* Exciting mix of 2D and 3D graphics in high-resolution
* Supports both 16- and 32-bit colour depths in software and hardware
* Each scene featuring multiple 3D characters with up to 1,000 polygons
each
* Support for most 3D accelerators through Direct3D
* Real-time lighting with detailed shadow-effects and moving light
sources
* Dynamic coloured lighting in both software and hardware
* Motion captured animations
* Skeletal animation system with real-time interpolation
* Real-time lip-synching of dialogue
* 40+ hours of gameplay
* 20+ minutes of high-resolution pre-rendered video footage
* Cinematic musical score
How
It Grades
Originality:
87%
Gameplay: 92%
Story: 90%
Graphics: 91%
Cutscenes: 92%
Sound: 92%
Music: 92%
Manual: 85%
Interface: 87%
Multiplayer: N/A
Overall: 91%
Specs
& Package
Overall
Score
91%
Version
Reviewed
English
Final Build 142
Release
Date
Out
Now
In
The Box?
4
CD's
1 Manual
The
Good Points
Mixes
3D and 2D well
Lots Of Puzzles
Great graphics
Great Music and Sound
Excellent story
The
Bad Points
Speech
can sometimes drag on
Characters can get blocky further away from the screen
Similar
To
Grim
Fandango
Reviewers
PC Setup
Pentium
II 450
Windows 98 Second Edition
128 Meg SD-Ram
Matrox
G400 32MB AGP Graphics Card
DirectX 7a
SoundBlaster Live! Value
17" LG Electronics Monitor
Microsoft Force Feedback Pro
Microsoft
Game Pad Pro (USB)
Microsoft Digital Sound System 80
Microsoft
Intellimouse Explorer
Widescreen TV - Sony KV-28WS2U 28"
DVD-ROM: Toshiba SD-1202
PC
Required
Windows
95/98
Pentium 200
32 mb ram
4x cd rom Drive
Mouse and Keyboard
640*480 SVGA high colour (16bit) video card with 2mb ram
Windows compatible sound device
400 mb free hard drive space
