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Platform: PC Review by: Matthew Fraser
Indiana Jones is such a cool movie series. It
opens with a whip crackin’, wide-brimmed hat wearin’, gun slingin’
archaeologist who takes 25 minutes to swap around a small idol for a
bag of sand. Come on! There was plenty of sweat for him to wipe off;
it isn’t his fault! Then, the plan backfires and he runs out of the
tomb running his ass off to escape the enormous boulder careening
its way towards his person.
Now imagine a game that is derivative of this
sort of movie. Same sort of adventurer, except he is so hardcore he
only needs his bare hands to kill off club-wielding witch doctors
with terrible reflexes and overgrown parrots who have escaped from
their cages.
Montezuma's Return is a story of a man who is
really out to just make a shitload of cash. Well, that’s what I seem
to put into the character’s mind. There’s no real backstory to the
game, or any story at all, really. It’s just solving puzzles and
beating the shit out of people, birds, rats, masked natives and
other random people, animals and…things….
The gameplay is an interesting blend of your
action game and your puzzle game with a good dose of platformer
mixed in. Oh, did I mention it’s in first person? Well, you could
probably guess that by the screenshots accompanying this review. But
it’s still interesting, nonetheless.
Those two or three of us in the audience who have
played or even have heard of Montezuma’s Revenge, the
previous game in the series released over a decade beforehand,
would enjoy seeing that 2D sidescroller turned into a vivid 3D
landscape. There’s more puzzle solving in the 3D Return than
Revenge, and the best thing about the puzzles is the fact that all
you have at your disposal to solve them are punching, kicking and
jumping. Environmental factors also play a part a huge part with
many puzzles requiring their manipulation to solve.
And there are a wide range of environmental
factors that affect you. Trampolines that light up like Christmas
trees (somewhat unusual for primitive natives to have trampolines
tag take you that high plus have LED’s embedded in the skin, eh?),
rocking platforms, rickety bridges waving in the breeze, doors that
decide to give you a thorough whacking if you get close to them, and
even a randomly placed robot!
The graphics are nicely done for the time era,
although there is one issue worthy of discussion. This game went
crazy with the 3D acceleration features, most prominently the
lighting of the damn thing. Every fucking thing in the game gives
off some form of light. Small little bulges on a rope have their own
light source; an insignificant rock in the middle of a 30 km by 30
km desert has its own light source; the creases on the skin where
the joints of your fingers are have their own light source.
However, this really isn’t too much of a problem,
since this game is never about realism. It’s setting out just to be
fun, and that’s it. It’s like watching those early Saturday morning
cartoons and playing a part. When you fall from a high height onto
hard ground, stars flutter around your head like you’ve been hit
with an anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon.
Montezuma’s Return is a nicely done game. Its
focus is on fun and on using more lights than a Bon Jovi concert.
The game looks nice and plays nice, even though the way your
character moves will make you seasick if you aren’t used to it.
Interesting enemies, fun puzzles, but a bit short; going back into
the levels trying to get all the treasures you can and unlocking
bonus rounds extends its life somewhat. It won’t scream for a
greatest game of all time award, but its not a bad little game to
have tucked away in the collection.
-- Matthew Fraser {12-01-2006} |
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Past Reviews by Matthew Fraser:
Recoil (PC) |
