Destination: Treasure Island
A trip to see Long John Silver that doesn’t involve Hushpuppies and a Coke.
Tags: Destination: Treasure Island Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Sep 27th, 2007
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Destination: Treasure Island (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Adventure | No | ||
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Destination: Treasure Island is an adventure game. It will scratch the itch for genre fanatics, but lacks distinctive character. Trying to pen a sequel to a novel that is over a hundred years old is tough, but trying to do so within the framework of a videogame is doomed from the outset. The player takes the role of Jim Hawkins, who has built a respectable life out of his share of the treasure from the novel. He gets a message that Long John Silver has died, and that he must journey to a remote island to receive the pirate’s treasure.
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There are only two things that this game gets right, the first is that to guide you through your quest developers used a clever plot device: an enigma penned by Silver with oblique clues to follow around the island. This spares you the random click-fests that frequently beset players in most adventure games. While that accomplishment would be enough, and the other would be that you aren’t allowed to leave certain areas until you have the items you need to proceed. This is a great asset in a genre that can make you backtrack through the game a few times to find a small item you’ve left behind.
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One of the first missteps that developers made was making the cursor a POV control. This means that items may be scattered all over the landscape. You get an early taste of how easily you can overlook something, as an essential item is hidden overhead in the first room. I think that this may be a better feature in a more in-depth game, but here it ends up eating time up, and making you spend too much time on a simple search. The idea must have been to make the game more challenging with this feature but it really is just an annoyance, it seems to be more of a feature to let you see the texture mapping on the ground.
If you really want to play this game, don’t read this paragraph as I will reveal a key point to the storyline of the game. So skip ahead, the rest of us will meet up with you. After you find Long John Silver’s chest of gold, you then find out that his real treasure is his daughter, Pepita, and the pirate captain wants Jim to marry her. The arranged marriage storyline isn’t only creepy, it is poorly executed. All of the sudden the whole tone of the game changes, and Jim is trying to rescue Pepita.
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Treasure Island was a classic, and it really didn’t need a sequel. In fact, they could have worked within the framework of the novel to create a game; instead what was created is a lukewarm sequel that fails to engage. The characters a two dimensional, and while the game gives some challenging puzzles nothing here will really stand out. The glory days of adventure games may never return, but it would be nice to see a game that excels above mediocrity.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Nice looking graphics + Game has somewhat of an internal guide to work from |
5.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Needlessly flogs a classic IP that has made it to public domain - First person-esque cursor is used to make some items harder to find, which is making the game needlessly hard - Replacing more complex puzzles and plot with obfuscated items is not increasing the difficulty |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| This is a game that will only satisfy the most die-hard of adventure fanatics. This game lacks the essential spark of life to make an adventure game come to life. | |
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Tags: Destination: Treasure Island
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Sep 27th, 2007 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
