Worst piece of crap ever put out there; complete waste of time and money.
The problem with the game is because the entire game is nothing but a QuickTime Application. Some games have used QuickTime for cutscene animations, but the whole game is entirely QuickTime, which is a convenient engine to use for small applications or web games, but not worthy enough quality for a commercial game. Aside from the extremely slow load times, the biggest problem, at least with this game, was that it was built on a very specific QuickTime version, and you had to have that exact version to run the game, but of course, no where in their manuals do they tell you this.
They provide a QuickTime installation for you to install from the CD, and since I had the same version, I thought I was fine. But after installing and trying to run, sound was horribly distorted. I figured I might as well upgrade to the latest QT version. But when I did, the game gives you a fatal error when you try running it and then it crashes. When I dedided to reinstall the version that came on the CD, the error continued. I was able to find out from people on the Net, that the game has to be installed AFTER a QT installation. So I uninstalled everything and reinstalled in the right order. But then when trying to run the game, it failed to recognize the CD in the drive.
Since it was originally a Mac game ported to Windows, I decided to load it up on a friend's Mac. Luckily, both Windows and Mac versions were on the CD.
Everything installed fine, but it also failed to recognize the CD in the drive when running the game. We then figured out that since it was an older game, that we tried booting into the older Mac OS 9. And FINALLY, the game was running at last!
It's pretty sad when you remember more about the frustrations of trying to install a game than the game content itself, but that's the impression it leaves you.
As for the game itself, the "story" was cliche--an alien entity has come to destroy the world and you have to defeat him. It's extremely linear, and there's very little background info other than that, and the rest of the game has the same feel. Whatever "story" is there simply moves you from one screen to the next rather than providing any depth of what's going on.
There were few actual puzzles and what puzzles were there required no logic to solve--just memory of a pattern and random clicks of your inventory to get something working. The game just consists of you traveling from one area to another. But as mentioned, since the whole game is nothing but a QuickTime appliction, you spend most of the time in the game waiting for the movie clip to load. You spend more time looking at the scenary than you do interacting with any game elements.
The photo-like images looked nice for its time. But that's because that's all they were--not animated graphics, but static images. Sound and music were almost non-existent. The interface was simple to use: just panning and zooming. Panning distorted the image, but the zooming feature was cool as it let you see the smaller details better or get a nice panoramic view of the whole scene.
There were numerous bugs and fixes for the game, and I had them all, but that still didn't fix everything. Some critical bugs included essential items needed to play the game disappearing from the inventory. There was one death scene near the end except you would never know it was a death scene. I did apparently something I wasn't suppose to and all I got was a black screen with the words: GAME OVER. Is the game over because I won or because I lost? Reading walkthroughs on the net was the only way I knew that the game did not end there, but the real end wasn't too far away, and not surprising, the end was just as anti-climatic. No end sequence or a simple congratulations on the screen--it just returns you back to the menu.
There wasn't much of a game. If it weren't for the agonizingly slow load times, the whole game could probably be played in 2 hours. It was too short for the amount of time required to install the game, but that was fine because I couldn't wait to be rid of the game.
I picked up the game for only $4, but even that was too much to spend on this game. Even if it was given to me for free, it's still not worth the time and effort trying to get this thing running. And even if you manage to install it without a hitch, the game is too easy and simple to play considering there are so many better games out there.