"Runaway" starts of great, but it loses steam in the middle and gets pretty boring by the end.
User Rating: 7 | Runaway: A Road Adventure PC
I loved this game at first, but after I got a while into it, I got extremely bored with it. The game looks great and starts off with some interesting puzzles, but in the middle it starts moving at a snail’s pace. The storyline progresses at an excruciatingly slow rate while you are stuck in some huge areas trying to solve poorly designed puzzles. The bane of any adventure gamer is the pixel hunt, and this game has at least a few of them. When you’re not pixel hunting, then chances are you are solving an illogical puzzle. And when you are not doing that, you’re solving some unoriginal puzzle that you have seen in other adventure games or brain teaser books. The best part about this game is the graphics. This game is beautiful to look at and has a style that is unmatched by any other adventure game. The cartoony cel-shaded look really adds a lot to this game. The characters fit in perfectly. Every character is exaggerated in some cartoonish way – exaggerated facial features, exaggerated accents, exaggerated personalities, etc. All of the characters in the game are likeable and show that the game was made with lots of inspiration. The game’s soundtrack is really good and most of the voice-acting is top-notch. The main character has this “gee whiz” dorkiness that actually ends up being kind of charming. But it’s just so hard to get into this game. The storyline is decent enough, but it progresses so slowly that you can almost forget what’s going on in it. Since the puzzles are not fun and interesting enough to keep you interested, you have to labor through the game to enjoy it. Many times you will find yourself resorting to a walkthrough, and then rolling your eyes at some of the absurd things that you are supposed to do to make it through the game. This is the problem with mediocre adventure games. The good ones manage to have logical and predictable solutions. The mediocre ones like this force you to try to read the developers’ minds and guess at an inane solution. I really wanted to like this game, but it was a disappointment.
