An Interesting attempt to combine the Victorian England of A.C. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and H.Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos
The environments, while amazingly detailed, also feel rather abandoned as there are typically only a handful of people or animals populating each game area. While this seems appropriate when exploring a disused warehouse, places like London or New Orleans feel empty and hollow.
The sound is well done. The voice acting is generally well done. Nobody's going to win an award, but neither will you be cringing due to poorly delivered lines. Ambient sounds are good if a little sparse.
Gameplay is quite linear. You can't progress from an area until you've found all that is to be found and solved all the puzzles that need to be solved. Holmes or Watson will let you know if you still need to do something. While this enforced linearity can feel constraining at times, I suspect it's better than the alternative of constantly having to backtrack. The puzzles themselves are mostly inventory or observational based and, appropriate to Holmes's world, are almost all solvable by applying logic, deductive reasoning and keen observation. There are a few of the more abstract logic puzzles that are more at home in a Myst type game, but there are only a handful off them. Gone too are the time based puzzles from the previous game. While this is generally a good thing, there are a few places where it doesn't make much sense. The developers decided, somewhat bizarrely, to throw in a chase sequence in the middle of the game. It plays out like something from a Jackie Chan movie with characters leaping from verandas, swinging on ropes, dodging barrels, and the like. As there's no time limit, it strains credulity as you can spend 5 minutes pondering the best way to cross a chasm and still catch the man you're chasing. The chapter quizzes that were present in the last game are here as well, but in a greatly diminished form. At certain key junctions, Holmes will ask Watson a question based upon what has happened so far and you must type in the correct answer to proceed. There are only 4 or 5 such quizzes and they all consist of a single question each. The game length is a bit on the short side mostly due to the fact that few of the puzzles are real head scratchers. (I did have to resort to a walkthrough for two of them though. I suck at logic puzzles....stupid clock puzzle...). For those buying the game for the Cthulhu aspects, I'd say you might want to hold off. The main focus of the game is definitely on Holmes's world of rationality, scientific process and deduction and not on the supernatural aspects of the world of Cthulhu.
Overall, it's a decent adventure game, but not a classic. There were some pretty severe bugs with the initial release, but they've been mostly cleared up as of the 1.3 patch. I still did have the occasional problem getting the game to start and had to try clicking the desktop icon 2-3 times, but no in-game bugs.