Having played the other games in the series, Uru leaves the gamer wondering WHY? Uru is a 3D adventure game that takes the gamer to different worlds called Ages through portals that are found in books. Writers create these worlds and through their writing the world comes alive. The backbone concept of the game is pretty solid and leaves a lot of room for developer’s creativity. You first start your journey in a desert and from there you would progress to other Ages as the history of the Ancient city of Dni is revealed. The story is quite interesting and keeps the gamer wanting more as he/she progress through the game. There is a lot of reading to be done in the game if you want the story to come alive and this could be tedious and downright boring for some gamers. It would’ve been nice if the books were also audible like in Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, because there is just too much to read and the PC monitor isn’t as easy on the eyes as book. Each Age is nicely made and design, the level designers did a great job keeping the gamer in awe as he/she progress throughout the game. Each Age is different from each other, adding more variety to the game. The atmosphere and the overall lighting further bring the game to life. The levels are filled with small details that make the game feel very polished and help make the story behind the Ages believable. Large variety of textures, some high resolutions others are low. The overall creativity is very artistic and pleasing to the eye. Without saying anymore, I was impressed with the graphical presentation found in this game. The sound further added to the well-designed levels, from ambient sound to the sound of loud machinery. While there were music in every age, its was played at acceptable volume so that it doesn’t detract from the environments but adds to it. Ok that’s the good parts here is the real deal. I have played this game knowing that the online option was already cancelled. Regardless of this news, the game still had other issues, which hinders the game in some significant ways. The developers have chosen the third person perspective for this game. While it deviates from the other Myst games, its main problem is not the actual perspective but the very poor implementation of it. The game is a chore to play from the third person perspective and what makes this worse is that there are few puzzles that are dependent on this perspective. The positioning of the camera and the controlling of your avatar is nothing less than laborious and at times frustrating. The other option to play from a first person perspective, which I have used to play almost throughout the entire game, because it’s significantly easier. Even though the option is given to the gamer, the perspective is still burdened with the unseen animations from the third person perspective causing your movement to lag. This becomes annoying because it makes interfacing with levers and buttons a pain since the game requires correct positioning of the character in order to interact with items. In some cases, you cannot directly interact with items unless you sit down. Because of the third person perspective, the game is burden with character animation, which brings the game’s pace to a crawl. Probably the most hated aspect in the game is the ascending and descending of ladders, which is mandatory most of the times. Even though the situation visually allows you to jump from a particular location instead of using the ladder, the game prohibits you with invisible walls. The game has a lot of invisible walls and when I say a lot, I mean a lot. There are many instances where it looks and physically is possible to go to a particular location but the game stops you with an invisible wall. With that said, I sometimes wonder why they even bothered making the game 3D. Most of the puzzles are logical and are shown to you in some form or the other except for two which were just very far from logical and require the use of interacting with objects using the games physics in the most awkward manner. The reason for this is due to the game’s non-existent inventory system, which worked for most of the puzzles, but some puzzles would’ve been more practical with an inventory system. Overall the game is fair. Because of the poor control system which lead to the poor interaction with games environment places the game in middle of “I hate it” to “Its alright”. This wouldn’t have been the case if the developers had stuck to the things that have worked in their past games.
When I first played the Myst games, I was hooked. The music, story, and everything about them were awesome. And RealMyst made it even better. The same goes for Riven and Myst 3; which are two other great games. If yo... Read Full Review
Every gamer has heard of the Myst series at one time or another. Every gamer also knows about Massive Multiplayer Online RPGs. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst was a noble attempt by Cyan to combine Myst's exploration and puzzle so... Read Full Review
