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The Mystery Of The Druids Review
Chris Leyton
00/12/0000
Can you uncover The Mystery of the Druids???
Two things came to my mind when the final review code for The Mystery of the Druids turned up, firstly the idea of strength enhancing magical potions, and secondly my fear for all things point-and-click.
The Mystery of the Druids is an old-fashioned point-and-click adventure set during the present day. As Detective Brent Halligan itās up to you to solve the mysterious Skeleton murders. A sinister story that links back to a time of druids and rituals, could these recent murders be anything to do with a thousand year old myth???
It hurts me to say this, but the first thing that strikes you is how poor the presentation is for this title. So graphics arenāt exactly the major focal point for this type of title, characters are rendered in 3D and overlaid atop pre-rendered backdrops. To there credit the backgrounds usually look nice with a fair amount of detail, however the clichéd style of each scene is often painful, the 2CV parked in the French port of Carmors topped it for me.
The 3D characters have a severe lack of detail, whilst the stifled animation is severe, this may be an old genre but we should be able to expect the graphics to have advanced. During play we also noticed a lot of glitches when the characters hadnāt been overlaid properly, resulting in an old professor bound to his wheelchair in one scene, look like heās hopped out and sitting on top of the desk in the next.
Visual gripes aside, onto the gameplay. In a game of this type, storytelling is a crucial key, set the right atmosphere and youāll draw the gamer in. To itās credit, with itās dark and slightly mature story, The Mystery of the Druids does this quite well. Its tale of druid sacrifices and mysterious murders begins to suck you in, until somebody opens up their mouth and emits the cheesiest blurb seen in a videogame.
Dialogue is clichéd, humorous and annoying at the same time, not the type of words you would expect after witnessing the ominous introduction. Those wishing for a hard-edged, dark mysterious tale will be severely disappointed as soon as the introduction has finished.
This proves to be one of the gameās main problems; itās not entirely sure what it wants to be, a dark detective story with sinister overtones or a Colombo spoof.
My problem with games of this type is that the solution to the problem at hand is often the most obscure one available, leading to severe frustration from my point. I know there is a huge amount of fans of this genre around, and for some of you there may be something here for you, maybe.
LucasArts succeeded with this genre because they made the games humorous, the need to progress always exceeded the frustration and that was where the appeal lied. Unfortunately this title lacks any appeal to progress further through the game. If the developers had worked on the detective slant it may have been compelling to progress, and find out what or who was behind these murders. However due to the laughable dialogue and the unclear nature of the puzzles I donāt see many people working out the great mystery.
Fortunately we were equipped with a walk-through guide allowing us to progress through the game quite easily, however the opaqueness of some of the puzzles should ensure a lengthy playtime at least.
One last personal gripe was with the character you play, a detective at Scotland Yard, and yet heās more then willing to get a street bum drunk so that he can steal his money!
