Universe


Title           Universe
Game Type       Adventure
Company		Core Design
Players         1
Compatibility   OCS/ECS
HD Installable  Yes
Submission      Emanuele Rodolà

Review
Boris's mum send him to take some mail to uncle George's house, an
apartment filled with odd objects and experiments of all sorts, carried
out by the bizarre scientist. Foolishly enough, Boris starts messing with
buttons and knobs on a strange machine, and promptly finds himself
teleported on to an alien asteroid in deep space. Of course he must find
the way home, and in doing this, he will also get the chance to save the
universe.

Visually speaking, Universe boasts stunning graphics, consisting of
beautifully drawn landscapes and objects, and we also have some neat and
atmospheric music by Martin Iveson. Evidently though, Core Design mainly
focused on appearance, rather than on the storyline and playability of the
game; in fact, this game can be regarded as a typical missed opportunity,
which is always a pity when it happens. To start with, although the static
graphics and background music are excellent, on the other hand, sound
effects are almost to nonexistent, and the animations are not particularly
good either (especially regarding the secondary characters). Also, the
game is somewhat reminiscent of the classics of the genre, such as The Dig
or Beneath a Steel Sky, even to the point of "quoting" some of their jokes
and situations.

Of course the first thing to do when starting an adventure is
familiarizing yourself with the commands. We are given an icon-driven
interface (which comes up with a right-click) where the classic look-at,
pick-up, talk-to and use actions are available, together with access to
the inventory. Then, there is an strange "Options" button, and an eerie
"Attack" button. The former yields a second actions-menu, where we are
provided with buttons for eating/drinking, pushing/pulling, using,
wearing, opening/closing, inserting, throwing, combining and jumping. Plus
a question-mark button which we can use for getting information about the
current scene (a written description of the environment we are exploring),
for copyright information and for load and save. Aside then from these
well-known, classic actions, let's have a look at that mysterious
"combine" button; this action is intended for creating new items by
putting together two existing items. For example, a wooden stick with a
thread would make a fishing rod, or a bow. Exactly what you would expect
when "using" an item with another. In fact, you can also "use" the same
two items together to get a different result. Quite confusing! Not to
mention there is one action which is never ever used throughout the game
(I won't spoil here by saying which one). Then we have the adventurer's
arch-enemy: arcade! And the "jump" button serves its purpose fairly often.
In fact, during the game, Boris will face many urgent situations where
somewhat nifty point-and-click abilities are required (this of course
includes the fact that Boris can actually die, or he can be captured - and
this will happen a lot!). For instance, you will be chased by evil robots
or have to perform timed jumps. Which would also be alright if these
arcade situations were few in number, or if the character was at least
easy to move about.

Talking about that, I felt less annoyed in a frustrating adventure like
Dark Seed, which put pressure on you by requiring you to do things at
specific times, than in the present case. In fact, Boris simply refuses to
go where he's told. The developers decided, for some obscure reason, to
not double-check the path finding algorithms, so that we have a main
character which is constantly entering the wrong corridor or stopping at
obstacles (corners, stones, and the likes). In addition to this Boris
sometimes walks a few steps and then just stops, especially when he is
walking along a wall, which makes it difficult to understand whether a
place is explorable or not. I forgot to mention that we can make Boris run
by double-clicikng on a target; this is a welcome feature and I always use
it. Too bad this functionality somehow yields further conflicts with the
above-mentioned path-finding and collision problems. So that we find
ourselves trying to make Boris run from a sidewalk to a bar, and soon
afterwards, trying to detach himself from a hydrant by clicking here and
there, and then he starts to run and flicker only to stop again, and so
on. This can be very irritating, especially during the semi-arcade parts
where you have to be pretty quick at doing things and reaching places. The
game is also flawed by a couple of major bugs which will put you in an
unwinnable state, and the only way to find it out is resorting to a
walkthrough. Don't worry though, for you will need a walkthrough anyway,
unless of course you have on your own the brilliant idea to "pull" an air
duct in order to step inside it, or to "attack" a terminal with a bent
metal bar to open a door close by. As a matter of fact, the only true
difficulty of the game are not the riddles themselves, which are
interesting nonetheless, but rather finding out the correct way to perform
certain actions. If you wish to open a metal panel, for example, you must
discover what to do: are you going to "attack" it with a metal bar, or are
you going to use a metal bar with it, or are you going to insert a metal
bar into it, or are you going to simply open or push/pull the panel, or
what else? Just try them all and eventually you'll get it to open. Thus,
difficulty here is essentially a matter of picking the right action,
rather than finding out what needs to be done. Which is, in my opinion, a
silly "trick" to increase longevity.

Thus, to put it briefly, the main flaws Universe suffers from are the
convoluted interface and the buggy programming; and you should not
underestimate them, since they can heavily influence your experience of
the game, and be assured they will. The dialogues are also a little bit
buggy as there is never really much of a choice on what to say, and the
conversation will always converge to the same lines, which do not take
into account the actions previously performed or the things already said.
By the way there are not many of them. The characters we meet are
short-lived (in the sense that you won't meet them more than twice), so
the game merely fails at letting you create a bond with them. They are
there to move the story along, so Boris just gets the chance to jump
from place to place only performing those few things that need to be done,
before moving on.

On the other hand, generally speaking Universe stays at an acceptable
level of quality for an adventure game. The story is entertaining, the
characters are funny and the puzzles are also fun to solve. If you haven't
played this game yet, expect a nice adventure, visually and musically
pleasing, which won't fail at capturing your imagination with its
world(s), storyline and tongue-in-cheek humour; as for the arcade parts,
the convoluted interface, and the many bugs, I respectfully suggest you
persist, remain calm and save the game a lot.




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