Shadowland had been known
for years because of its high level of criminal activity. Fatman,
their superhero protector, has worked tirelessly to eliminate these
criminals and after finally eliminating the city of all its evildoers,
boredom set in. Late one night as he wished for a super villain to
test his mettle, lo and behold, Toxicman appeared. It seems the rivalry
between Mary & Kate Cosmetics and ACNE prompted Mary & Kate
Cosmetics’ CEO to perform a drastic course of action as he ordered
one of his employees to bomb the ACNE building. To cover his tracks,
he attempted to eliminate the bomber, but ‘fortunately’ for the employee,
the toxic from ACNE factory did not kill him, but instead turned him
into an insane super villain with absolutely no special capabilities.
This is where the fun begins: an overweight superhero against a lame
super villain. The Adventures of Fatman is consistently entertaining
and is chockfull of good-natured jokes and humor that is never over-extended.

If there is a downside to The Adventures of Fatman, it’s that a talented game developer like Michael Doak used a Batman look-alike as the main character of the game. Even the Bat-mobile and Batman’s soundtrack is used in the game. I realize that he has created a parody of Batman, but I would have liked to have seen this obviously talented individual use his abilities to create his own superhero style for the main character. The story, on the other hand, is very original. Lately the adventure community has been force fed stories revolving around Egypt, Atlantis, or time travel. It is amazing that almost one out of four adventure games released revolve around these three subjects. Fatman uses as its storyline a simple subject that we read about in our daily life – a rivalry in the industrial world. It proves that a simple subject can be very entertaining if executed correctly.

Most of the features in this game are standard for a point and click adventure game. Several predefined words such as ‘Walk’, ‘Look at’, ‘Interact’, ‘Talk to’ and ‘Use Inventory Item’ are used to interact with objects and other characters. It is simple system, nothing fancy, but served its purpose quite well. It would be nice if for future projects the developer could implement an auto-detection capability similar to the Lucas Arts games of the early 90’s. In those games, when you wanted to interact with an object, the most common word related to the object was directly highlighted. The user could then improvise with their own logic to use different words together. The save game feature is limited to six slots, but that is more than adequate. For those who like their character to quickly travel from one point to another, the walking speed can be adjusted in the menu options. There is one original concept that, in my limited knowledge, has never been implemented in another game: an optional behind the scene audio commentary for each screen. It is a unique feature that might give you a hint on what to do inside that screen. This feature can be activated by pressing the F12 key from any screen within the game and often offers some entertaining commentary. Fatman utilizes a points system that reminds me of the good old days of Sierra adventure games. Your progress can be tracked by total points achieved. Of course you need to do some ‘extra’ works to gain a perfect score. I would like to see this old point system used more in upcoming adventure games.

Fatman‘s graphics are difficult to judge and the cliché ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ fits nicely. It would not be fair to compare Fatman to a high-budget commercial game as it is the work of one person, but, on the other hand, I have to remain objective. For that reason, I am using Dark Fall as the benchmark for reviewing Fatman‘s graphics as it also was an Independently Developed game. Some people might say that is a different category since Dark Fall is first person perspective whereas Fatman is a third person perspective, but then you could always compare the quality of the backgrounds. Fatman‘s graphics are not really as smooth as Dark Fall or even The Eye of The Kraken. In fact they are quite pixelated and grainy and are similar in quality to Maniac Mansion or the first entry in the Police’s Quest or King’s Quest series. When I play a computer game, the first thing that catches my attention is the story. If the story is good then I can overlook shortcomings in the graphical area. For this reason, Fatman‘s graphics might be passable for me but others may not feel the same way.

The voice-overs are very professional and representative of the characters. It is a blast how the narrator explains everything throughout the game in a serious voice that is actually very funny and entertaining. The only downside is the background music that keeps on playing on the background. Fortunately, the music can be disabled by sliding it to the lowest level in the menu options.

The controls are very straightforward. Nothing innovative, just a basic point and click interface. Basically, you choose the verb you want to use and click on the screen to execute your choice. To combine objects in the inventory, you just have to click the ‘Use Inventory Item’, choose the item you want to combine and then, to combine them, click on the second object. The right mouse button is used to scroll through the various verbs. On a few screens, it is difficult to locate some items. It is not really hard to find most inventory items, but it could also be a pixel-hunting nightmare for certain small objects if you do not scrutinize carefully. Fortunately you can always detect the location of an object by just moving your cursor over it as the object name is then shown on the screen next to the predefined words. The conversation tree could use improvement as sentences should be grayed out so you know what you have already chosen. But, this is a minor detail that exists even in some commercial games. One of the biggest problems is that there is no indicator of the location of the exit on each screen. You just have to figure it out by moving your character there and hoping he will walk off the screen into the next area.

Fatman is a short game that the average player should finish it in about 10 hours, but more experienced players might be able to squeeze it down to 6-8 hours. But please try to look at and experiment with everything. Be bold and try something stupid just to hear and read the funny consequences resulting from your actions. Believe me, it is really worthwhile and adds to the gaming experience.

Fatman is not an easy game but neither is it very difficult. Don’t be fooled by the ‘Easy Mode’ and ‘ Hard Mode’ categories as the only difference is you can not retry when you die in ‘Hard Mode’. The puzzles are the same in both modes, but in easy mode you are supplied with small hints after several failures. There is not a single puzzle in the game that is there only to lengthen the game: no slider puzzles, no mazes, no sound puzzles. They are all logical and serve the desired purpose.

The product is very stable
and ran smoothly without any crashes on both Windows 98 and XP. There
are currently no patches needed and it even ran with my screen capture
program on in the background without any problems. I did find one
small glitch inside the game. *** Spoiler *** When you are at the
Doughnut World after the first visit, you can increase your score
indefinitely by continuing to talk to the waiter. You could even get
a full score by doing this again and again. *** Spoiler ***.

Better graphics and longer
game time could easily have earned this game a grade of A. It has
all the necessary ingredients for a good adventure game and is definitely
worth your $15. The humor is entertaining and the logic of the puzzles
will have you asking why other, higher priced games are not as well
thought out. Nice job!

Final Grade for The
Adventures of Fatman – B-

System Requirements:

• Windows 95, 98, ME,
  2000 or XP
• Pentium 100 MHz or faster
  system with at least 32 Mb RAM
• 320×200 standard VGA
  display
• All DirectX sound-cards
  are optionally supported
• Mouse

The Adventures
of Fatman grades:

Final Grade: B-