You thought this would be just like any other investigation. But now you find yourself lost in a mysterious mansion brimming with strange creatures, comatose colleagues, and mysterious tentacles around every corner...
There was a brain in a bonnet in the first scene. This game was out there somewhere. It was out to lunch. So weird. I loved how crazy it was, how unusual and rebellious it seemed at the beginning, certainly the first hour, which just so happens to coincide with the demo hour! What a coincidence. After the demo, I bought it and it quickly became a bit more pedestrian. It lost some of that initial excitement and thrill, it promised and delivered in the first hour but got a lot tamer as it went on. The graphics were lovely, the ambience and atmosphere were really good. Great gameplay too but it disappointed a little in the later half of the game, simply because it didn't or couldn't live up to its initial wonderful brand of kookiness. it was also a little short. A memorable game to say the least.
Not the best in the trilogy but still a good game. The one thing I found that let it down was the ambiguity of the ending. I didn't feel I finished it I suppose because I didn't. There was nothing to tell me it was finished, apart from no more quests to do. I took that as a sign but had heaps of mini games left to unlock before I decided to finally throw in the towel. I didn't enjoy the mini games. They were annoying and unimaginative and repetitive. The game revolved around them too much. I enjoyed the hidden object scenes though and the quests and the script and dialogue was funny. I bought this because of Theodore the janitor turtle. Just a great character but was he enough to save the game? Maybe. He was certainly enough for me to purchase the game. A clearer ending and less of a mini game theme would have brought the score up a notch.
Your villagers start out as cute little creatures. When you drop them on top of each other, they breed. You can make 50 villagers max for your tribe. At this stage, if you drop them on to a pile of wood, for instance, and then onto an unfinished building, they will become a gorilla and a builder. If you drop them on the nut trees, they will become a giraffe and a forager and so on. There are five animals that the little creatures turn into and they all have specific jobs Gorilla - Builder Giraffe - Forager Elephant - Water Gatherer Lion - Village Guard Zebra - Doctor I found it was a good idea to make about thirty gorilla builders very early on, in order to get the two most important and basic buildings up fast, (water and food storage) before the villagers could die of starvation. They died on me once and I wasn't taking chances a second time! The animals gain experience as they go along and are only able to solve some puzzles in relation to the knowledge level they are at. There's a lot of free will in the game and no real hints, and a lot of problem solving. I'm not good at puzzles, yet everything in this game I found very doable. Nothing was impossible. It doesn't hold your hand or guide you but there are a few clues here and there and with a little perseverance and those two main buildings built as early as possible, survivability to the end of the game is achievable. The animals are so full of character too and I love the way they're drawn. I thought it was a great game and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
It combines a desert island type game with villagers, farming time management and cooking! You have to farm ingredients, make and sell lots of delicious dishes as well as keep all your villagers happy. So, it's a basic Sim game too. It's a very linear game and you have to play by their rules. You can't build a hut for instance, or breed, if you want to up your population, like in some other games. You have to wait until you have completed certain tasks, in a certain order and you are very much railroaded. There's very little free will. The food storage was a constant source of frustration, even upgraded to max food storage, you may still find that it gets full very quickly and you have to constantly sell stuff and juggle. The worms that attack your farm are a novelty at first but it soon gets boring and annoying. If there were a variety of different animals or forces of nature to threaten the farm, I think this would have made it more interesting. Everything is very money orientated, so you have to pay for villagers rather than get them when you build huts or have babies and they don't die or get old, or indeed have an age, so in that way it feels quite clinical. It's more geared to good game play than a story where you feel engaged with the villagers and can relate to them. I really did enjoy it though and will definitely check out the sequel.
At first, I didn't like the impersonal masks that villagers wore in this sequel to Escape From Paradise, plus they were all male! The masks I could understand after a while, as they had a practical purpose. You gain colourful feathers on the masks that symbolize the three main skills, lumberjack, provider and carpenter, so you can see at a glance what expertise your villager has gained. I didn't complete this. There were a few loose ends to tie up, like the missing jewels for example. I remember old school games could have you banging your head against a brick wall over and over and you'd just go right back and keep doing it and eventually give up. While old school is great at times and wonderfully nostalgic, it can be very frustrating. This is a fairly new game and the only thing that lets it down is that the game play isn't very user friendly. People were tearing their hair out in the forums because they couldn't find the 10 skulls that needed to be found at one stage to progress. Thanks to the wonderful people who make the walkthroughs, some people stopped tearing their hair out! Me included! But what happens with games like this is, you get past a really difficult part only to find another, so all these genuinely well-meaning and fantastic people on the forums will find that they have their work cut out and they're trying to put a plaster on a wound that needs a bandage, a big one, but thanks guys for all your invaluable help!
Lots of fun if you like island adventures where you build huts, gather resources and solve the mysteries of the island. I did get stuck a couple of times and had to go to the walkthrough but that didn't really hinder the gameplay, as it was only towards the end that I needed help. I thought the gameplay was generally very good. There are lots of mini games, which you can skip. One of the games I really liked was the mini game 'Furious Feast,' which can be played at the Diner on the island. It was like SpongeBob Diner Dash, in style, graphics and gameplay but without SpongeBob! There are twenty levels. I didn't manage to complete the twentieth level but played all the others. Those types of old school diner games are rare these days. I think that was my favourite bit of the game, certainly a major added bonus.
Lots of nice hidden object scenes, although relaxing, I found them a bit plain and boring. Good game play and dramatic interesting cut scenes, cinematics and story.
This game has an enormous sense of fun, humour and is so relaxing to play. The quests are hilarious and always make me smile. It's like a soap opera combined with larger than life marine characters with rich back stories and even richer everyday lives. There are back to back hidden object scenes with mini games/puzzles, which can be skipped automatically. I also liked the building/renovation area and collecting gems and trophies.
A delightful game with interesting characters, story and humorous script. It's mostly a HOG but there are side quests, which are very entertaining to read. I also enjoyed finding all the food for the sea ponies and feeding them. Although, I did get a bit bored of the sea ponies after a while. It's a really long game and you do get your moneys worth. I would say it was a family game, as I played it with my husband, who was absolutely hooked on it.
A old school adventure game, which was quite clunky and I was not able to move people around smoothly or easily. However, despite this, I liked the graphics, the characters, the voice overs, story and script. You have to have a bit of patience figuring things out, you don't have skips or hints. Not ideal gameplay and not overly user friendly but nothing was impossible and it was a enjoyable and entertaining game.