It is absolutely crazy to me that a game that looks this ugly came out from a major publisher in 2000. You fire this thing up and the animation and character models and backgrounds just slap you full across the face with no warning. PC games weren't exacly known for their photorealistic beauty at this point in history, but we're not talking the dawn of 3D gaming here. This company - on this engine - made GRIM FANDANGO two years earlier, and that was great. This game looks like EARTHWORM JIM 3D. It looks like BUBSY 3D.
I probably wouldn't be so hard on it if the rest of the game didn't suck huge also, but it does. Charmless, zero-laughs writing just drafting off bits from the previous games, a nothing plot and totally unrecognizable returning characters, absolute garbage puzzles from start to finish, one legendarily stupid minigame, and an abysmal control scheme (a.k.a. the worst part of GRIM, but that game was, you know, really good, so it didn't matter). After the last game was such an unlikely success, it sucks that they went and dicked the dog this hard right afterwards. It's even more disheartening to see the unbelievable pass this thing got with reviewers in its day. Were they just trying to prop up the genre? Afraid that if they gave the biggest-name point-and-click of the year its deserved D+ for effort that they'd kill them all for good? Didn't make a difference either way, I guess. But good lord, if this was the best they could do, the genre deserved a break.
....
(sorry, one more thing about the graphics. So like ... this game has pre-rendered backgrounds. So ... shouldn't the character models be good? Couldn't they use a COUPLE more polygons?? They look SO BAD. The backrounds are jpegs! This is the PC for Christ's sake, not the N64! FEAR EFFECT came out nine months before this!! Wtf was going on here?!?)
I probably wouldn't be so hard on it if the rest of the game didn't suck huge also, but it does. Charmless, zero-laughs writing just drafting off bits from the previous games, a nothing plot and totally unrecognizable returning characters, absolute garbage puzzles from start to finish, one legendarily stupid minigame, and an abysmal control scheme (a.k.a. the worst part of GRIM, but that game was, you know, really good, so it didn't matter). After the last game was such an unlikely success, it sucks that they went and dicked the dog this hard right afterwards. It's even more disheartening to see the unbelievable pass this thing got with reviewers in its day. Were they just trying to prop up the genre? Afraid that if they gave the biggest-name point-and-click of the year its deserved D+ for effort that they'd kill them all for good? Didn't make a difference either way, I guess. But good lord, if this was the best they could do, the genre deserved a break.
....
(sorry, one more thing about the graphics. So like ... this game has pre-rendered backgrounds. So ... shouldn't the character models be good? Couldn't they use a COUPLE more polygons?? They look SO BAD. The backrounds are jpegs! This is the PC for Christ's sake, not the N64! FEAR EFFECT came out nine months before this!! Wtf was going on here?!?)