Hoodwink review

Now I want to state for the record that I am a massive adventure game fan. I remember back with fondness to the days of The Dig and Full Throttle, the film noir brilliance of the Tex Murphy detective stories, the complexity of The Longest Journey and the sheer wit and inventiveness of
the Monkey Island jaunts.

I'm all for originality and trying something unusual and clearly the guys behind Hoodwink (E-One Studio) thought they'd go for an impressionistic look to the graphics here, in a post-environmental catastrophe society where the citizens of trash city Global-01 are ruled by a corrupt megacorp. The only problem is, they ended up with both interiors and exteriors that look mind-numbingly drab. For example:

The hero, Michael Bezzle, is a thief (em-bezzle, geddit) and you're hoping at the outset that maybe he will use his skills to take on the evil business empire. But no, all he wants to do is get some chocolates, flowers and a ring together to propose to his wheelchair-bound girlfriend. To do this, he approaches corny Flower Power babe Saffy who sends him on a fetch mission.

This is where the inventory kicks in. You know, the bit in adventure games where you collect loads of random items and guess how to use or combine them to solve a task. Only instead, you collect an item, put your cursor over the intended target and the correct item in your inventory immediately appears, ready to be slotted into place. And the challenge is...?

Of course you must meet some quirky characters - like the cat detective above that you burn alive in the first scene and then see reappear completely whole about twenty minutes later. And yes, there's a robot with a human brain that has the screamingly unfunny name of Brycke Shithausen. In fact, thanks mostly to some Grade-C voiceovers, I was hard pushed to find a single sympathetic role and my heart sank further when I learnt this was only the first of a series of forthcoming episodes.

Even the mini-games lack any sense of urgency or danger as they mostly involve grabbing something before you get attacked and the puzzles usually demand that you rotate the cursor until something moves. Seriously, there's more animation in one of the Myst games than in the whole of Hoodwink's episode one. And don't get me started on how sluggishly all the point 'n' click movement operates...

But as I'm ever an optimist, I'm hopeful that by the time E-One Studio have got round to making episode two, they will have spent several weeks studying Tex Murphy, Monkey Island, & Co to realise that adventure fans can't be hoodwinked into accepting basement bargains.

Score: 1/5