Has a few good points
Ripper is now ten years old, and despite its bugs it is still a fairly enjoyable gaming experience. The puzzles are intuitive and very challenging, thankfully without ever reaching the level of so difficult or so illogical that they become frustrating. The environments are interesting (if a little weird at times) and generally look very good considering when it was made.
At 6 disks Ripper is a long experience (though comfortably shorter than its aforementioned 8 disk stablemate), and the story is engaging enough to hold your interest throughout. Also the game boasts four possible solutions to the mystery thus enhancing its replay value. However this feature is a double edged sword, seeing as the plot doesn't differ enough during each possible mystery to make the solutions believable. When asked to choose who you think the Ripper is at the end of the game it is more a case of randomly choosing than being able to work it out. For example, I played the game through twice to begin with, had two different killers but failed to see how the plot differed between my two games. In terms of puzzles this is the games only weakness. Sadly it is the games main overarching puzzle meaning that it is a pretty major flaw. I think Take 2 wanted the game to have replay value (something that point and click adventures generally don't have) but just weren't able to achieve it properly.
A big source of frustration is that the game has lots of bugs. Less than half an hour into the game the graphics screwed up and I became stuck unable to get into a room. I needed to download the patch, which considering that at the time I had a very slow internet connection was very annoying. Even the patches failed to correct minor graphical glitches. The fact that the published version has so many bugs leads me to believe that the game was never tested. It has the feel that the people making it lost interest in the project half way through, which is a great shame as it could have been so much better. The story is weird which means the game was never going to be a mainstream hit, but it could have become a classic in its niche market if more time had been spent on it.
The game seems to have been almost exclusively marketed using the actors that star in it, and credit to Take 2 for getting some recognised faces. I wouldn't say that any of the performances are bad, but none of the big names really excel themselves. Christopher Walken gives a trademark quirky performance, overacting to the extreme in all of his scenes. If you are comfortable with Walken's style of acting then he is a treat to watch though people who are not used to him may be slightly disconcerted. The usually fantastic John Rhys-Davies seems slightly uncomfortable with his character and the script and thus his perfomance is somewhat disappointing. The blame for this must lie with the script writers rather than Rhys-Davies though. Of the other known acting quantities, Karen Allen, David Patrick Kelly and Burgess Meredith acquit themselves reasonably, though all seem (like Rhys-Davies) to be uncomfortable with the script and the concept of the game. The script itself is pretty weak, seeming wooden, generic and emotionless. It tries to inject emotion by overusing bad language, but this just makes it seem very amateur hour.
On the whole Ripper is a fairly enjoyable experience, and worth playing for fans of the genre. Its successor Black Dahlia is a far more polished and complete game, with Rippers flaws highlighting just how far Take 2 progressed in the two years between the games releases. This is not to say that Ripper is bad though. It has some interesting puzzles and an engaging story, though the feeling you get playing it is that its developpers didn't really care about the project, meaning that it could of, and should of been far better.