Uru: Ages Beyond Myst

The Good
Uru is not like other Myst games. It has a third person perspective (or an optional first person), keyboard controls, a fully 3D world, a customizable avatar, and...jumping. Myst fans might find this to be an atrocity, but I found it to be the first Myst game I could actually get into. Uru takes place in the present day. You are an explorer who felt the "call" to D'ni, the world under the earth where the people who write Ages live (it's hard to explain). There's not much reason for you being there, so you have to make up your own beginning. You eventually find a message from Yeesha, who wants you to go on the Journey, and...well, you really have to play the game to understand the story. I loved the third person view unlike some other people. The controls are quite easy to pick up (for me), and it really makes the game a joy to look at. The graphics are simply stunning. There hasn't been a game released yet that has better graphics than Uru. The sound is amazing as well. You really just need to hear it to believe it.

The Bad
Some puzzles are annoying, and loading times are LOOOOOONG. That's really it basically.

The Bottom Line
If you don't like Myst games, you do now. That's all I have to say. Buy this game. Play this game. Love this game. NOW!

The Good
All of the games in the Myst Series up until this point have had several things in common: beautiful graphics, original musical scores, first person perspective, strange mechanical puzzles and a "point-and-click" interface. Well ... URU is not the same as other Myst games. There are similarities, but it's the gameplay that stands out as unique.

You're still all alone, with the exception of an apparition and one insignificant character in the beginning. You won't see any "real" people in cut-scenes or otherwise, which is also different from the others. And puzzle clues are still almost non-existent.

Being able to choose a male or female character is nice. And I liked being able to change their appearance and their wardrobe. But, these things to me were just fluff.

Forget the old advice we've follow for years "Pick up everything and anything" and "Save your game often". Neither of these things applies in URU because there's no inventory and you can't save games in the normal way. There are "checkpoints" that help you get to a place near a familiar area. (More appropriate for console platforms than for the PC.)

Yes, the "ages" are gorgeous, the music lovely, sound effects realistic ... and the puzzles are still strange. In URU, you can choose to play in first OR third person. In fact, you'll need to use both to get through the game. Also necessary is using both the keyboard and mouse to navigate around the game screen ... especially to negotiate the action segments. Yes, I said Action! You'll find yourself not only walking and running, but climbing and jumping. And, since there is absolutely no inventory, your character will be kicking ground objects around to solve some of the puzzles.

The Bad
I didn't like URU at all. It taxes all of your system resources and is a memory hog to boot. Long installation and long load times added to my irritation.

I felt like Lara Croft without weapons and enemies! I didn't mind the absence of inventory, but I hated the jumping segments. For those of you who are "keyboard challenged" like me, you'll probably agree that jumping from high platforms over treacherous ravines and failing is not fun. After failing miserably several times, the wait time to reload the "age" was up to 5 minutes .. enough time to walk away from the computer to do something else. Without the UHS hint file, I would have quit long before finishing.

The ending didn't conclude anything for me and left me wondering what on earth the point to all of it was. (Maybe we were supposed to go to URU Live to see the results - a moot point now that it doesn't exist.)

The Bottom Line
I don't think I was ready for what this Myst game was all about. To say that the controls take a little getting used to is an understatement. The imagination that brought us D'Ni and the written "ages" is still there ... but navigating through them felt like old technology ... or borrowed from another genre perhaps.

The Good
The graphics (Powered by Plasma 2) are stunning, without killing hardware. The music is nearly flawless, and fits the ages like a glove. Ambient sound is unbelievably realistic (if you have an EAX compatible sound card). The puzzles, while some are massively difficult, are elegant and appropriate.

The Bad
The game has a couple bugs, (mainly with collision detection and some video cards), and a lot of the puzzles are beyond me, requiring a sharp eye able to pick patterns out of things and re-apply them elsewhere. In addition, Uru was meant to be a MMO game, but that mode was discontinued by Ubi Soft before it even finished beta.

The Bottom Line
Great game; not much point because of the publisher's somewhat silly decision to switch it's format to single-player (note that Gametap has revived it, and re-released it with online mode).