Realms Of The Haunting

A Review By

Carrigon

Email: juliean130@yahoo.com

URL: https://www.angelfire.com/games4/carrigon/home/rview.htm

(C)1999

There were many things I liked about this game, and quite a few that I didn't. So, I'm going to divide this review into two sections, The Good and The Bad :)

The Good: When you first start the game, you're in a creepy old house, full of atmosphere, with plenty of locked doors that you just know will need puzzle solving to open. So right away, you're all excited. The sound fx were great and never failed to give me that feeling of creepiness :) ROTH has twenty chapters/levels, each with wonderfully different settings and wildly different monsters. There are so many different kinds of monsters that it's impossible to get bored fighting them. The same goes for the levels. I really enjoyed visiting all the different "worlds". Mostly, the levels are all different mazes, so if you like mazes, you'll really get into this game. You can also adjust the arcade setting to make the game harder or easier. And you get a good variety of weapons. The puzzles were very enjoyable, some easy, some more frustrating. The FMV (full motion video) was just enough to compliment the story, not too much at all. And I found that I looked forward to the video clips. Playing ROTH is alot like playing an interactive horror movie, but it's much more fun than alot of games that have tried FMV and failed. I know what you're thinking, as soon as I said "interactive horror movie" you probably had visions of Phantasmagoria or 11th Hour. But I promise, this game is NOTHING like those. The FMV is never abused here. You just get small clips that compliment what you are doing. You never feel like you're just watching stuff. You always feel like you're controling the action. Does this game have replay value? Well, I like playing it again for the levels and interesting monsters. And the actors in the FMV are fun to watch. So, yes, there is replay value.

The Bad: Okay, there is some bad. The storyline, from a writer's and a gamer's point of view was a total MESS. First of all, you really don't know what's going on until chapter 10, which is halfway through the game. So for the first ten chapters, you're just like, "Why am I doing this?". The story is very hard to follow unless you really read the journals, and the journal pages are difficult to make out at times. And there are places where the story totally contradicts itself, such as The Dodger, whom we assume is good and then find out he's not and we have to fight him at the end. And the Men In Black were never properly explained. They were just there, like, let's throw some MIB's into this thing. The story needs an editor, badly! Another story issue is that the game is very linear. You can't visit areas in chapter 19, if you're in chapter 10. I would have liked to have seen some flexibility with the story having different pathways. I would also have liked more than one ending. As far as the acting in the film clips goes, while I thought Tuomi (Adam) was incredibly cute to look at, he failed to ever be scared enough in any of the clips. I think that's just due to inexperience. Stick him on primetime tv and he'll be fine :) Now, the health issue. There is a huge lack of health potions in this game. We never get enough health to face all the monsters without restoring a million times. We could possibly forgive that, if they would've given us a health cheat code. I think that was bad judgement on the production end because it's the reason most gamers refused to pay full price for the game. And the map issue, we get maps, but it's hard to look at them because you have to keep moving them around to see the whole thing. In spite of these faults, I found the game to be very enjoyable. It's a wild ride and it's certainly worth spending a week playing it.

Requirements: I played this game on a P233, 32megs RAM, 24x CD Rom, ESS soundcard, S3trio video card with 1mb of VRAM, mouse, and Win95. The game ran pretty smooth, in fact, it ran better than I had expected. The only problem I noticed was game music, I didn't get any! No matter how much I tweaked it, all I ever got was music during the video sequences and speech and sound effects during gameplay. The speech and sound were fine. I suspect it was my soundcard. Other than that, the game never crashed on me at all. It should be noted, however, that this game is a hardrive hog. The minimum install takes up almost 70 megs off your hardrive. That's alot, especially if you play on an older system. And using the minimum install, the game runs alittle slower, too.

The requirements on the box are:

Minimum: 486dx2/66, 16 megs Ram, mouse, 1 meg Vram, 2x cd rom, SB compatible soundcard, dos based Win95 (play in a dos window). It'll run on an old 486, but I don't know how well.

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