Every time the storyboarding gets to a point where the designers really have a chance to show off, they just flub it. When Jake first lands on Luna Crysta, there s a great opportunity to throw in a snazzy cinema sequence of the space shuttle landing at the mining colony. Instead we get a thoroughly unexciting shot of a flying cereal box with wings, setting down at an incongruously cool looking biosphere and riding down an elevator. It just didn t all click. The game is filled with visual inconsistencies like this.
Backgrounds tend to be attractive, but the puzzles, items, etc. appear overly simplistic.
Here s where the game really falls down. While the main storyline is fairly interesting, it would be much more interesting to watch as a movie than it is to actually interact with. This is a mystery, but it lacks the compelling quality that all good mysteries have. The amount of tedium involved in watching a nice smooth transition between two visually well designed scenes is mind-boggling when you watch it for the five hundredth time. The designers seem to have gone overboard on audio and video, cramming files onto their CDs in no discernible order, which just exacerbates the swapping problem.