Amazon: Guardians of Eden

The Good
The games story may be pretty terrible and the acting poor (the next bit will divulge more) but the interface and puzzle management work quite well. Controlling the main character with the keyboard makes the boring motion of watching a character cross the screen more fun, though this was necessary as using the mouse to control your character is very frustrating. The puzzles are logically thought out and when you've cracked them you can see the point to them, there's no real random combining of objects here. The game comes with a built in hint system, which is absolutely invaluable to get around any leaps of logic there are, or unusual ways of interacting with objects.

The Bad
Hmm, where to begin? The story is terrible, it tries to follow in the vein of 1940's movie serials and this seems to be an excuse for terrible writing and hammy acting. The story is divided up into serial chapters with cliff hanger endings, except these chapters aren't evenly spaced so you might be playing for half an hour in one chapter, five minutes in the next. The cliff hanger endings are a joke, they're often no more than someone suddenly asking a question, and they come at strange moments making it difficult to save, which then means you have to watch them over and over. The game actually takes about five times as long as the story is to play, as it's easy to get caught in a dead end which it points out to you, except it sometimes means you have to go back four or five episodes to pick up the necessary one pixel graphic you missed. Many of the sequences were timed, which meant playing the same thing over and over many times. The acting was terrible and the graphic do a ham job trying to blend digitised actors into hand drawn backgrounds, resulting in real actors standing next to cartoon characters. There is a small smattering of digitised speech, but this is so low quality it might have well been missed out, the story plays well enough without it.

The Bottom Line
I would have thought something better could come from Chris Jones, before going on to make the classic Under a Killing Moon, but alas this isn't it. At least there are no bugs and you can play the game through, but it doesn't deliver a good, or funny story, doesn't make you feel like you're in any of the locales, and comes across as someone trying to copy a bad format, and making it worse. Sorry.