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Jack Keane, fresh from a pair of mittle-european studios, is definitely a game that wants to tap into that yearning for a return to the golden age of adventure gaming. Let’s see how it stacks up. The main character you play is the titular Keane, a sort of swashbuckling ne’er-do-well on the run from a pair of unsavory debt collectors in London. The game begins with our hero tied up at the top of . . . well, I’m not going to tell you what’s he’s on the top of, because it’s kind of cool when you find out. At any rate, he is most definitely at the mercy of two violent goons. Your first job is to escape this awful situation. Very, VERY reminiscent of the opening of The Curse of Monkey Island. After the entertaining escape, Jack is tasked with the job that is the basis for the game’s adventure: He has to sail to Cape Town, South Africa, pick up a British secret agent, and deliver him to the mysterious Tooth Island, where a nefarious mad scientist is doing mean things to tea plants. Jack is an orphan whose past is shadowy, and it’s not clear at first whether or not it’s relevant to the main story. The game wants him to be a cross between Han Solo and a slightly grown up Guybrush Threepwood. First of all there’s the writing. It’s not bad, it’s just not good. For every laugh out loud joke (and there are a few, I’m happy to report), there are many deadly would be “jokes.” The fact is, very few studios have ever made third-person animated adventures with the wit and imagination that the Lucas Arts teams did (happy exceptions including The Feeble Files, Simon the Sorcerer, The Neverhood, the Broken Sword games and the first Gabriel Knight games). Face it, Lucas Arts spoiled us. I know recent attempts to recreate the magic, such as in the Runaway series, have their fans. To my thinking, however, games that attempt this formula do so at their peril, since the memory of true excellence in the genre is still fresh in the memory of many gamers. Back to Jack Keane. In addition to the so-so writing, the thing that REALLY drops the game below the heights it aspires to is the, oh and I’m so very very tired of writing this phrase, TERRIBLE, ABYSMAL VOICE ACTING. When, when, WHEN will game developers come to understand that this aspect of a game, particularly a third-person comedy adventure, is PARAMOUNT? I’m so weary of playing games where it feels like the voicework was handed off to the director’s girlfriend’s little brother. I realize that this game was not created by people whose first language is English, but I don’t care. If you’re going to release the game in English speaking markets, then put some goddamn effort into the vocal work. I think if you can’t produce excellent voice acting in an adventure game, you shouldn’t have voicework, period. The dialect work in Jack Keane is simply fingernails-on-a-chalkboard bad. Particularly the various “English” accents. Yecchh. Okay, let me pull in the claws a bit and talk about the game’s biggest strength. That would be its visuals. This game is gorgeous. Simply gorgeous. It’s as pretty as the vocal work is horrible. There is a welcome lushness to the game’s color palette that just leaps off of the screen. The art department has had a field day with expressing the game’s tropical settings with colors so hot and bright you want to eat them. I can’t remember being this delighted with the vibrant color scheme of a game since the (sadly obscure) Jack Hopkins, FBI. The environments are so pretty that they actually goose up the pleasure in the game play. You spend most of your time in Jack Keane running around, meeting people and solving their problems or overcoming the obstacles they throw up at you by a series of not-at-all bad inventory-based puzzles. The puzzles are fairly logical, and even when they aren’t, they never stoop to the brain-damaged territory that Runaway did (make peanut butter by using a radiator to melt peanuts and butter . . . uh, yeah, right). The fact is, when you’re sitting there trying to figure out what to do with a telescope, a rifle, a can opener and a garter belt . . . it’s a lot more fun doing it when the game environments are so bright and pretty. The game also gives you the chance to take a break from playing Jack, which is a nice diversion. The fact is, if you can put a clothespin on your nose to protect you from the stench of the voice acting, and you don’t mind too much that the bad voice actors are reading a just-okay script, and you concentrate on the game’s story, puzzles and beautiful environments, you can have a lot of fun with this game. Jack Keane is an admirable effort which is compromised by a half-assed and inconsistent focus on the quality of the various game elements. If they hired a good writer and a talented voice director next time out, the developers could make a game that’s a true throwback to the golden age of pre-Myst third person comic adventures.
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