Thoroughly average, even for fans, but for the right price it's worth playing.
Alright, that should do it. Just us LOST fans here now, right? If you're a Lostie, the Island has long since pulled you into its mystique. Since pretty much none of us have the opportunity to fly to Hawaii and visit the lush jungles where the show is filmed, LOST: Via Domus is our best opportunity to explore the place that holds so much fascination for us all.
The ability to explore the Island is the game's greatest strength. Here you'll get to walk around the crash site, explore the camp, and run through the jungle to the hatch. Much like the show, there are fun secrets to find, like the Dharma van. The Pearl, Hydra, Swan, and Flame stations are all featured in the game, fully explorable and built from blueprints made by the show's creators. Some of the stations were barely seen in the show, so the video game offers players a LOST experience that cannot be found elsewhere. The sprawling Hydra station, the location of many Dharma experiments on animals, is particularly interesting. In a show where the mythology is so important, being able to get a physical grasp on the layout and contents of these stations is an engaging and worthwhile experience for fans.
Unfortunately, you've got to slog through a lot of crap to get to the good stuff (not unlike season 3, if you think about it). You play as Elliott Maslow, a plane-crash survivor who is not featured on the show, just in the game. Elliott has amnesia after the crash, and you are tasked with helping him recover his memory. The game play associated with this is about as exciting as you expect, which is to say not very exciting at all. Expect lots of fetch quests interspersed with canned "action" sequences to make you feel like you're actually doing something. Occasionally these bits of action are truly exciting; being chased through the jungle by the smoke monster is just as terrifying as it is in the show... at least for the first time. What is exciting once or twice gets stale after doing it over and over again, and the problem of repetitive action plagues this game. The game throws in a few spatial logic puzzles to shake things up, which are actually quite fun if you are into that sort of thing. And, considering you're a LOST fan, puzzles are probably right up your alley.
For every good thing you can say about this game, there's another bad thing to bring it down. Talking to your favorite characters is awesome, right? Sometimes it is, but for others, particularly Locke, you'll want to stick your fingers in your ears to stop the atrocious voice acting. Being a part of a LOST flashback is a great idea, except you have to play the same sequence over and over again because the game doesn't do a good job of judging the content of the pictures you take in these sequences. Everything about this game is just average. It's not bad, and it's not great. There are parts of it that are really fun, but other parts are numbingly awful. Still, if you're a huge fan of the show, it does have good things to offer. Check your bargain bin, and I do mean bargain bin. I checked my copy out of the library, and it was worth every penny I didn't pay for it. If you can get it for very cheap or even for free like me, go ahead, you'll probably enjoy it. Otherwise, let the buyer beware.