A well executed digital recreation of the Tower of London, but a failure as an exiting game
User Rating: 6 | Traitors Gate PC
Traitors Gate puts you in the shoes of "Raven", a highly skilled operative who has to break into the Tower of London to snatch the British crown jewels. The story is a bit muddy on this issue, but it seems that your employer suspects that the jewels will be stolen by somebody else, and sends you in to steal them instead, to spoil the attempt. In the game you move between fixed locations, which can be seen in QuickTime VR-like 360 degrees views, that you can rotate freely. Once you click an "exit" from you current location an animation shows you walking to the next viewpoint. This kind of interactivity is reminiscent of games like Myst and Riven, and the game does manage to catch some of the same mystique, even though it is located in a real environment. You will be moving around and solving puzzles inside the ancient tower of London (which is actually made up of a large number of different towers). The game's strong point is the attention to detail in recreating these towers, and their hallways, rooms, corridors and historical objects within - and solving their secrets in order to move on. But here the praise ends. The game does not manage to present as interesting (or difficult) puzzles as some of the other titles I mentioned earlier. While it's exiting to sneak around as a cat-burglar, the fixed-position gameplay just doesn't make for exiting stealth action. Theres no "hurrying into the shadow" when a guard comes, you are either caugth or not. In the end it seems more like you are walking a round a "Virtual Tower of London" infotainment CD-ROM, than actually playing a game.
