Amerzone: The Explorer's Legacy Review (dohh)
My goodness is this game beautiful. The story is fantastic. A great tribute to the original.
-The thematic and incidental (background) music is wonderful. The English voice-acting is very professional; the story, the characters, the voice acting, the environments suck you DEEP into the narrative and propel you forward into the story.
One can choose to play with hints (which help a lot...little by little), or the player can progress without hints (which are very well integrated in the form of a notebook). The Inventory is easily managed.
-This is a wonderful combination of old-school navigation and 360 degree viewing once you get from point A to point B.
-Everything about this game is engrossing: the visuals, the music, the story, the voice acting, the environmental audio.
-I originally had an issue due to the fact that there is NO MANUAL SAVING. I'm old school and I miss the fact that SO many games (indie or large-company games) DON'T have this feature anymore. But to be fair: the game autosaves pretty frequently, and if the player quits, they're warned as to when the latest auto save was ("you last saved 3 minutes ago", etc). I'm in chapter 4 (there are 6 chapters, I think), and the game has auto-saved "enough" for my satisfaction. Basically every letter you pick up to read, every task you solve; autosaves are frequent, as stated. There are also chapter replays once you're finished with each chapter. Also: 3 save slots (for starting 3 different games, I guess).
-I have a 5 yr old Dell gaming desktop, fully updated, running WIN 10 and running the game off an external SSD drive. The game has not yet crashed or hiccuped; it runs very well even on my "old" PC. One thing of note: the game, at least on my PC, is not very well optimized only in that it causes GREAT fan noise for me, no matter which grfx settings I run it on (low, med,high). This NOISE!!!!! may be more of an issue with my PC or my PC fans than with the game. And as noted, the game is NEVER choppy for me and runs just great, even on the highest grfx settings.
So GET THIS GAME, especially if, like me, you are a huge fan of the late,great Sokol's games. Microids/France did an overwhelmingly great job with this. It's gorgeous and is well worth the money.