dreamshark's Full Review: Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary for Windows
First of all, let's get one thing straight. This is a Myst-style puzzle game, not a first-person shooter. The lushly detailed backgrounds shown on the box are just that - static backgrounds, not 3-D environments that you can move through at will. You can rotate in place and look in any direction, including straight up and straight down, but you can only move from click-point to click-point. Things are livened up by numerous well-animated cut scenes and occasional interludes that could be referred to as "action scenes" (really just timed puzzle sequences). However, the main gameplay consists of the standard adventure game repertoire: picking up inventory items and using them on hot points in the environment or using clues to solve little puzzles involving flipping levers, lighting matches, turning dials, etc. The clues, found in old books, scraps of paper, and even primitive recording devices, serve to fill in the back story.
The atmosphere is relentlessly creepy, and the cut scenes that accompany the action sequences can really make you jump (that's a good thing). This is a very story-driven game, with lots of animated scenes and semi-interactive dialogues. By semi-interactive, I mean that you have no real choices to make in how you respond to the non-player characters - you're really just walking through the cut scenes as if it were an interactive movie. Depending on your expectations and preferences, this is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a very cinematic game, which is one of its strengths.
The puzzles are straight out of the old-style graphic adventures of the mid-90's, mostly revolving around combinations of inventory items. The puzzles can be very hard, which could be viewed as either a plus (challenging!) or a minus (frustrating!). Compared to other games of this genre, the puzzles seem to be reasonably logical. Sometimes they rely too heavily on performing tasks in a certain arbitrary "right" order, and there is an awful lot of groping around in the dark to find the hidden hot spots and inventory items, but that kind of comes with the territory in this type of adventure game.
Up to this point, I've been describing a game that is well above average, assuming you like this kind of thing. Challenging puzzles, complex story, attractive graphics, effective atmosphere. Unfortunately, the user interface is one of the worst I have ever seen!
There are absolutely NO install options. You are stuck with an extremely minimal hard-disk install with the game played almost entirely from the CD. Every time you move the mouse or open your inventory the game hangs for a couple of seconds while the CD spins up. Then the mouse suddenly wakes up again, usually causing the cursor to fly across the screen, overshooting whatever you were trying to point to.
There are no keyboard controls at all, just point and click with the mouse. Worst of all for those of us with tired wrists, the mouse sensitivity is too low (and cannot, of course, be adjusted). Remember I mentioned that you could look in every direction, including up and down? That probably sounded like a feature, right? It's not - it's a nightmare. In order to find all the hot spots, you have to look ALLLL the way up in the air and ALLLL the way down at the ground, while rotating in place. With the slow moving mouse, this requires tendonitis-inducing amounts of wrist flexing.
Then there's the tedious startup and exit sequences, and the idiotic save/restore system. Why do developers feel a need to "improve" on something as simple and straightforward as a list of saved games? For some reason, these developers thought it would be a great idea to have you access your saved games (which are limited to 8, btw) by using that poorly calibrated mouse to rotate 360 degrees while peering at murky thumbnails of saved scenes presented as "windows" spaced around the inside of some sort of round tower.
Okay, I confess, I did not finish this game. Despite its flaws I might have finished, or at least played a lot further, if I hadn't had such a hard time with the mouse control, and if I hadn't gotten so annoyed waiting for the CD to spin up every time I looked at my inventory. YMMV.
To Recommend or Not to Recommend?
I wish there were another choice in the little drop-down box besides yes or no. This one is very much a Maybe.
Did you love the old King's Quest, Zork and LucasArt games? Was your favorite part of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers the scary atmosphere and complicated puzzles? Was Sanitarium the best game you ever played in your whole life? Do you have a limber wrist and a patient disposition? Are you okay with having your puzzle-solving interrupted by an occasional fanged monster leaping out of the shadows at you? Then you'll love this game.
Are you looking for lots of action and excitement? Does pixel-hunting drive you nuts? Does the idea of returning to the same locations over and over again to see if a new hot spot has appeared strike you as unbearably tedious? Are you at risk for carpal tunnel syndrome? Better skip this one, then.
Well, I guess I'd have to say that I WOULD recommend this game - to the right person. So I'll go with Recommend. I hope you know by now whether I'm recommending it to YOU or not.
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