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Next Life
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Graphics & Sound:
Next Life has an overall average feel to it. While the visuals aren't too bad, they are by no means top notch. Locations have a nice look to them, but just don't feel quite right. Other effects like crashing water or birds flying about also seem to lose something and feel fairly fake. The character models are nice, though. When up close and talking to a character, you can make out a lot of details and you can read the character's expression surprisingly well (typically those expressions are loneliness and sadness), but when the camera is pulled back, like when not talking to an individual, they all appear small and at times pretty blocky.
Audio is always a sticky spot for translated or foreign games, and unfortunately for Next Life, that is the case here. Pretty much every character has a thick European or Russian accent and the main character is included in that group. It isn't really the accents that throws off the audio, although there were times when I had trouble understanding the conversations; it is some of the statements that are said. They just don't always sound right and something is lost in the translation. I've heard him say comments like "Depression finishes her," and "This guy is absolutely alright, at least somewhat," that sort of make sense, but I could only really know what the meaning was based on context.
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Gameplay:
If you're like me, when you first boot up Next Life and see your character, Adam Raichl, drive into the side of a tanker truck and die in a fiery explosion and then wake up a split second later in a small metal cabin on an island with people from other times and places, you will probably think you are about to play an unofficial Lost videogame or at least have a nice mystery about the afterlife thrown at you. Unfortunately, while the game's point is to try to explain why this group of people are on this island after each of them has seemingly died, the other issues with the game far overshadow any real desire to progress in the story, and the story itself is strange and doesn't quite work right.
You first get the impression that the island contains nothing but a beach, some metal huts, a mysterious bell tower and six or so people, but the island is bigger than it appears. The real mystery is what this bell tower means and why all the people fall asleep after the bell tower rings three times. When you wake up after being forced asleep, it is always back at your cabin and with your inventory emptied, which is really annoying. Another aspect to the island's mystery seems to be a rumor that people disappear from the island after their second night, so Adam has to work fast if he is going to figure out all of the secrets of this place.
Unfortunately, the game's mysteries are hindered by its slow pacing and frequent backtracking. There are several times in the beginning of the game when you can move a boulder or open a door on your own, so you need someone to help you. When this happens, you have to go back to camp and ask each person one at a time if they can help, someone will, but it is a long and drawn out process. Sad to say, that isn't the only case of backtracking in this game and quite frankly, I didn't stay interested in the story for very long and the only reason I kept trudging through its puzzles was so I could write this review. |
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Difficulty:
Difficulty is a tough subject when it comes to Next Life. While the game's puzzles are mostly pretty obvious, getting to the solution is typically the hard part. It really bothers me when I can see exactly what I need to do in order to get through a puzzle, and I even have all of the items necessary in order to do it, but the game won't let me perform the actions because I haven't talked to the right people or gone down a specific conversation path so they can explain to me this is what I need to do. It wouldn't have been nearly as bad if the game gives you some indication that, while you are on the right path, you need to talk to someone. Instead it just lets you wander about the island mindlessly thinking the obvious solution can't be the right one. Now there are quite a few logic puzzles that, when I encountered them, took me a while to work through (like at the construction yard), and those were a nice challenge, but there weren't enough of those to overshadow the obvious puzzles that I couldn't solve because of unnatural restrictions.
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Game Mechanics:
The 2.5D third-person point-and-click adventure genre has been around for a while. It has pretty solid standards of what to expect as far as the flow and feel of the game is concerned. I'm not talking about stories or what puzzles should be used, I mean the mechanics of the game. Everyone expects your character to make some remark when you pick up an object or the standard single-click walk/double-click run features. So when a game, namely Next Life, has trouble with these mechanics, it is pretty obvious pretty quickly.
The biggest issue is that the game pauses for just a second before and/or after doing some action. If you want to walk to the other side of the screen, Adam either has to slowly turn around before actually walking or it takes him just a second before he starts moving. If you want to pick up something, you click the item, the game pauses, you put it in your inventory and the game pauses again. When you transition between scenes, there is a delay where you should be able to start walking immediately, but it's paused. Each time a pause occurs, you are forced to do nothing because the mouse is locked and the game doesn't take any inputs. This is really annoying and makes the game feel unnaturally stretched out and long.
Then of course there are the pixel hunts. Next Life suffers from this problem really badly. While the scenes look pretty good, the hotspots don't do anything to stand out, so you will spend a lot of your time slowly moving the mouse from side to side across your screen looking for anything that might light up your cursor. It looks like Future Games tried to solve this problem by letting you hold down the E key in order to highlight certain things on the screen, but this doesn't show you hotspots, mainly just areas where you can exit the screen. This might be nice because you might not realize from the picture itself that you can go off around the left side of the cliffs or walk up a set of rocks as stairs, but it doesn't do anything for the rest of the hotspots. That being said, there shouldn't be a need for a special button in the first place. It's like treating the symptom, not curing the disease.
As much as I like adventure games, I can typically find some enjoyment from them and can usually see other hardcore adventure gamers enjoying them to some degree, but there is just too much holding this game back for me to recommend it - sure the game is pretty and it conveys its atmosphere pretty well, but the puzzles and gameplay issues are just too much to ignore. |
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-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows 2000/XP/Vista, 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, 768 MB RAM, 4 GB Hard Drive Space, 16 bit DirectX 9 compatible Sound Card, 64 MB DirectX 9 compatible Video Card, 16x CD ROM Drive |
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Test System:
Alienware Aurora m9700 Laptop, Windows XP Professional, AMD Turion 64 Mobile 2.41 GHz, 2 GB Ram, Duel NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 256MB Video Cards, DirectX 9.0c |
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