My take on A New Beginning [Spoilers]

[TimTreachery]

I've read a few forum posts here ranting on how bad this game is so I thought I'd write a post about my experience over the past week or so.

First of all I am a fan of point and click adventure games, having grown up playing the Monkey Island series, Sam and Max, Broken Sword etc. As such I have pretty high standards when it comes to PAC games - in the case of A New Beginning I feel that most if not all these standards were met.

The story, although a tad far fetched, is quite engrossing and I disagree with anyone who says that the player needs to be an environmentalist to enjoy it - that's like saying you need to be a solider to enjoy Call of Duty.

The dialog between characters reads well and does a good job for character development however the voice acting does waiver at points where the protagonists both feel and sound a bit robotic/emotionless. In addition, there are parts of the game where the dialog has been translated incorrectly or not at all - on occasion I will try and perform an action on an item or door and Russian words will appear.

Being the most important part of any point and click adventure game I'm happy to say that the puzzles and strategies used to progress through each chapter are great - there were only one or two that seemed really bizarre (such as putting a file in an apple pie to put in a microwave) and the rest felt like they were in perfect balance as to allow you to progress at a decent speed while still having a feeling of accomplishment.

The game is noted as having 20 hours of play time, I personally think this is accurate however I can see that some people may just not get that much time out of the game. It's very easy to get frustrated at any PAC game and then all back onto a walk-through, this really defeats the purpose and I would bet that it's the reason so many people complain about the play time.

The soundtrack is great, I have not one bad word to say about it and I feel that it definitely reflected the mood of the characters and myself in different situations. The uninspired worker scene really showed this off.

All in all I definitely think that this game is worth the money, it will give you an in-depth and enjoyable story-line to follow, characters to invest in and puzzles that will definitely have you both hitting your head on the screen and looking around for someone to high five in the wee hours of the morning.

[RosePlayedThis]

Totally agree, and the soldier analogy is very true. I don't like the English localisation, though, but I wonder if Americans can tolerate it better since at least it's an American accent for them? I'm British, but fluent in German, so played the German original - which was brilliant.