So at some point, someone, is going to realise I'm not a terribly diligent game reviewer. And why should I be? I pay £3.00 for a game and it's rubbish. So what? Either you're a collector, at which point you don't care what I have to say or you're a muppet, and you waste money willy-nilly on games you're not interested in and your looking on the web to see if your fear are going to be confirmed. The other option is obviously is that you were a developer for this game, and you just Googled for it and up came this modernish review: in which case Sorry. Either way, there is not a lot I can do to help, and whether I play a game for thirty minutes or three days won't make any difference
So, how did I invest my thirty minutes with this game: Heart of Darkness?
Ten minutes were immediately wasted watching the fully rendered introduction sequence. And to be fair, now looking back on those ten minutes, it was the best the ten minutes of the entire thirty minutes I spent. If you like Flight of the Navigator, if you enjoyed films like E.T., and Wargames from the 1980s you going to like the introduction to Heart of Darkness. Sure, it drags on, but it captures the spirit of these 1980s kids adventures quite nicely, and I say lap-it-up because it's as good as gets from this game.
The next ten minutes was screaming and yawping and swearing at the TV. Why? Heart Darkness, during it's development cycle, re-animated the nefarious instant-death goblin that gaming hadn't seen since the last copy of Super Mario World on the NES was played. And god, how I hate that goblin.
Before I go any further, Heart of Darkness is a platformer, a platformer spread on two CDs. Yes, two. Now, don't get me wrong, I like a platformer game, and I'm not so Playstation blinded that I won't play a nice 2D platformer. In fact, the 32bit games consoles and above, have created some truly fantastic looking 2D platformers, so I was pretty keen on a platformer that was spread across one-thousand-two-hundred mega-bytes. That's a staggering amount of storage space for a 2D platfomer. So, honestly, I was, on the quiet, pretty excited.
My excitement was heightened by the fact that Eric Chahi of Another World (Out of this World to Americans) fame was involved in the development. I rate Another World as one of the most beautiful games ever, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
So, to recap, we have Eric, two CD's and an orchestral score. This is likely to be awesome. Isn't it? It is? Right?
However, pausing now, as I do, to reflect on that, I should have seen what was coming next, but blinded by wide-eyed hope, I did not.
What did I not see? I didn't see the two CD's being crammed with pre-rendered full motion video. Perhaps I should have done. Perhaps, after years of studying the 3DO, I should have suspected that the one and only way to justify two CDs for a platform-game is the most liberal use of full-motion-video ever. And of cause an orchestral music score uses up a few bytes.
What I should have perhaps also seen is the Insta-death.(tm) By the end of the first few screens of Heart of Darkness I had been eaten, crushed and plunged to my death. And I was mad. Through no fault of my own. Through no mistake of not reading the signs. You know what? I'm a gamer, this is my world. If something twinkles, do I not pick it up? If something rumbles, do I not step back should it collapse? If an enemy shadow goblin comes running at me, do I not whack away at the X-button to try and kill it. I do. I'm a gamer. It's instinctive.
Yet Heart of Darkness does not play by these rules. It plays by it's own rules. Invisable and unseen.
Rule 1 of H-of-D: This is quite a short game, so delay the player by killing them very very frequently, they will think it's longer and therefore better value.
Rule 2 of H-of-D: Buy stock and shares in joystick manufacturers as Rule 1 is likely to drive all gamers insane.
So what do I know? I know that the shadow-creature things can come at three levels: Low, medium and high. I know the big and the extra big monsters can eat me. I know that every so often the game will just kill me because, so it seems, it hates me. And I know there is no way to cross that narrow bridge without plunging to my death. And that's where I gave up.
Now, the thing is, if I had bought this ten years ago for around forty pounds, there is every chance I would have stuck at it, but I only paid a few pounds and therefore I don't care. So, that said, ten minutes into actually playing the game. I finally got the arse, and gave up, but not entirely. What I did then was set the game to 'Easy' and played it for another ten minutes. Sadly, it didn't help.
If you have the patience of the Biblical Job, then hey, you're going to enjoy this. If you enjoy Full Motion Video, and you enjoy the idea of Eric Chahi ever-so slightly rehashing the story line from Another World, then knock-yourself-out, I on the other hand, have my sock draw to re-organise!
3DOKid.
