Welcome to the world of Paradise Cracked. Come on in, and bring all of the patience you can muster. You’re going to need it.

There have been lots of games with clunky controls. Outcast, while a great game, was a bit cumbersome to learn. Gothic, a truly interesting 1st-person RPG, had controls which could practically defeat the casual player.

But nothing I’ve ever wrapped my fingers around prepared me for the Coit Tower of Clunk that is Paradise Cracked.

Let me start by saying that, buried underneath the baffling miasma of its controls is what may very well be a good game, yearning to get out. While the story is not wildly original, it’s a solid, dystopian, Blade-Runnery, William Gibson-influenced cyberpunk story set in a dark, grimy city full of lots of crime and not much law.

The main character (though you eventually can control a party) is called “Hacker.” Guess what he does! Anyway, the game begins with him on the run from various dark and dangerous factions and with only one helpful bit of advice: go see Sam Lee in Chinatown. He might have something for you.

This is a perfectly good setup for an action game (think Max Payne), or an action-adventure game, or an adventure game (think Nightlong or Blade Runner), or even an RPG.

In fact, the game calls itself an RPG.

BUT – and this is a big, honkin’ “BUT” – the designers made a fatal flaw. They trapped their well-intentioned cyberpunk RPG in the clothing of a squad-based, turn-based strategy game.

That’s right, the gameplay of Paradise Cracked is like that of Jagged Alliance. Now, I’m not knocking the Jagged Alliance games. In those games, you picked a squad for each mission (which had clear objectives), and then you manipulated your operatives around the environment in turn-based mode.

Now, most of us that have played any RPG or strategy game has some experience with turn-based combat. I generally love it. It makes combat tactical rather than frantic.

BUT – in a squad-based game like Jagged Alliance, it’s not just the combat that’s turn-based, it’s everything. So you are moving your characters around the map, a calibrated number of hexagons at a time. This works fine in a strategy game, because the maps are finite, with clearly-defined goals.

This “everything-is-turned based” model does NOT work in an RPG setting at all, because much of the point of an RPG exploring the environments, talking to characters, and then getting into some trouble with beasties or bad guys. It’s one thing to switch into turn-based mode for combat in an RPG, but to stick the whole game in it is a catastrophic mistake.

Why? Because it means that gameplay is played at the glacial pace of the old tabletop war games of the 50s and 60s. I’m not kidding. After an hour of haplessly pushing your guys around a couple of hexes at a time, your face is in danger of falling off out of boredom.

To make matters worse, between turns, your forced to stare at loading screens while other, computer-driven characters, engage in “invisible movement.” These screens are generally longer in duration than your actual turn.

But wait, there’s more! Remember I mentioned the interface? Well, at least it’s extremely non-intuitive, endless, baffling, way over-busy and just generally off putting in the extreme. I longed for the smooth and effortless controls in Gothic.

So . . . we’ve got here a good premise for a game, a promising story, very decent 3D graphics, 3rd person with decent camera control – all put in peril by a the double whammy of a terrible interface and a devastatingly wrong-headed game mechanic. Either one of these flaws would be enough to sink a good game. Put them together and you’ve got the Titanic.

Final Grade: D

System Requirements:

Minimum: Pentium II-400Mhz; RAM 128 Mb; Video Riva TNT2 with 8mb; 300Mb free hard disk space; DirectX 8.0.

Recommended: Pentium III, Athlon 800 Mhz; Ram 128 Mb; Video GeForce 2 GT or GeForce 256 DDR with 32Mb; 300Mb free hard disk space; DirectX 8.0

This review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link back to Just Adventure.