In
the latest Jekyll & Hyde from The Adventure Company (there
in fact was another almost ten years ago, completely unrelated to
this one), the parties concerned have once again tried to concoct
a computer game that will appeal to both action and adventure gamers.
And, like so many countless others before them, they swing wildly
and miss. J&H is about 70 percent an action platformer
with some exploring and puzzles and traditional adventure-game inventory
activities shoehorned in between. It’s hard to envision either the
adventure or action camps embracing it wholeheartedly.

Poor Dr. Henry Jekyll has
his hands full in late Victorian London trying to concoct a cure in
his lab for a mysterious epidemic ravaging the city. Unfortunately,
he instead develops a serum that transforms him into a Yeti in a ripped
suit, Mr. Hyde. A minute later he falls down the well is his backyard
and uncovers a vast cavern system filled with enormous statuary and
man-traps apparently built by the ancient Greeks, or maybe the ancient
Greek gods themselves.

So,
Dr. J, the dedicated scientist and clinician that he is, decides to
explore this new hidden world in the hopes it will cough up the vaccine
he needs. Which is to say that not only does Jekyll & Hyde not
have very much, if anything, to do with the famous Robert
Louis Stevenson novella, it doesn’t even have much to do with
its own extended backstory and intro. What you really get is a cave
crawl and a variation on the Marvel comic the Incredible Hulk.

Dr. J, trusty torch in
hand, handles all the puzzles while Mr. H shows up for most of the
action sequences. Both characters are controlled in third-person view
by the keyboard (with an option for mouse control or game controller)
There’s an inventory where Dr. J can occasionally combine things or
blend new potions, but largely this is a game of exploration, running,
jumping and dodging. Which would be fine, if only it worked.

By
far the biggest downfall of J&H is the character controls, and
to a lesser extent the game engine. The game utilizes something called
PhysX by Nvidia. Perhaps this is some modern technical marvel, but
for me it boiled down to the entire game world lurching around drunkenly
every time I tapped a direction key.

Worse, the camera angle
often changes dramatically and without warning. Usually when you’re
trying to run away from something. You’ll be dashing for an open doorway
straight ahead when, bang, the camera angle swings around and suddenly
you’re pitching yourself headlong over a fiery chasm. Thank you very
much, Mr. Game Engine.

Even
worse is the character controls. Sometimes the jump key works. Sometimes
not. Sometimes you need to hit it three steps before the cliff edge.
Sometimes two steps. Sometimes one step. Have fun experimenting! Also,
the directional keys usually only turn the character 90 degrees. So
if you want to jump off a cliff at a 45-degree angle, tough luck.
You have to spend a minute or two shimmying the character around to
get him in position. This is bad enough when you’ve got plenty of
time, but later in the game you’re going to be dodging lightning bolts
while attempting this. I once spent about five minutes and about a
dozen “respawnings” just trying to get Dr. J to jump over
a simple two-foot wide gap.

Oh, did I mention there
are save points? There are roughly three dozen spread out across the
game. If you die in between these you will be respawned somewhat near
where you bought it, but in the final chapter of the game, which is
one extended action sequence, these points are fairly far apart. I
spent over an hour just getting back to one point that I’d gotten
stymied on the day before. What does this game developer have against
save games, anyway? How does forcing me to replay huge chunks of the
game improve my gaming experience?

There
are a few things I liked about Jekyll & Hyde. Once I got
over my initial surprise that the story has nothing to do with Victorian
London, I found the exploration of the subterranean passages to be
fun. I also liked the implementation of some of the logic puzzles,
few as they are. Nothing you haven’t solved before, but well integrated.
I had the sound turned completely off and the graphics settings on
the lowest of the low in order to get the game to run on my laptop,
but I went back later to listen to the music and thought it was nicely
atmospheric. I even enjoyed some of the “action” puzzles
— the mazes and the swinging blades of death and that sort of thing.
Also, once the game is installed, all eight gigs of it, you don’t
have to keep the DVD in the drive! Bonus points for that.

The other thing I did admire
about J&H is that it offers action other than the act of
extermination. There are, believe it or not, action-adventure hybrids
that I have played and enjoyed. In fact, I just recently completed
Alone
in the Dark, practically the first such offering, a DOS game
from 1992. Like J&H it mixes puzzle-solving with exploration
and survival. And like J&H its controls are less than smooth.
But unlike J&H, Alone in the Dark has a better story, a
better mixture of action and adventure elements and it lets you save
whenever you darn well feel like it.

I
still think the greatest action-adventure game is Tomb
Raider. In fact, I’d bet that its great success in the Nineties
is what spawned the many attempts to follow in Lara’s footsteps. I
still play the DOS TR1 demo from 1995 from time to time. It takes
up only a few megabytes and still offers silky smooth 3D third-person
action. Though there is plenty of shooting and fighting in Tomb Raider,
it was and is still primarily about exploration, adventure and 3D
puzzle-solving. I have to believe that this is what Cyan was attempting
to duplicate with URU —
to make a true 3D world with physical puzzles. Lara has to change
her environment to make progress. Move a block here, climb a ledge
there. That’s what makes TR great, not Lara’s pistols.

If
you are going to give J&H a go, I think you need hardware
close to the high end of the system requirements listed below. I also
have to believe the game has got to work better with a game controller.
I did get the chance to play about a quarter of J&H on
a computer with a 256-meg graphics card, which decidedly helped with
the “lag” between keypress and onscreen result and the lurching
camera swings, though the character controls remained clumsy. I didn’t
bother to turn the voices back on because outside of the rather cheesy
coloring book cutscenes that crop up at the end of each of the game’s
six chapters, the dialogue mostly consists of Mr. Hyde going, “Ugh,
me strong!” Oh, and don’t turn off the tutorial mode — at one
point the game stops responding if you have it off. So much for beta
testing. The game has been rated “T” for teen, but aside
from the usual cartoon mayhem there is absolutely nothing objectionable
in it. I’m still scratching my head over the ESRB listing of “Partial
Nudity.”

Jekyll & Hyde
is not a complete disaster. It’s got a confused, nonsensical story
and an awkward mixture of action and adventure elements, but it does
try to be something more than just another shoot-em-up. I’d say that
it’s a “B” adventure slapped onto a “C plus” actioner
with, alas, “F” character controls. It’s the latter that
really does this game in. Overall, I give Dr. J and Mr. H a C minus.

Minimum System Requirements:

• Operating System Windows
  XP, ServicePack2
• DirectX 9.0c (will be
  installed if required)
• Processor 1.5 GHz
• RAM 512 MB for Windows
  XP/Windows 7;
  1024 MB for Windows Vista
• Graphics card 128 MB
  (for low texture settings)
• Pixel Shader 3.0
• The following graphics
  cards and any newer
  Pixel Shader 3.0 compatible versions:
• nVidia Geforce 6800
• Radeon X1800
• Sound card DirectX 9.0c
  compatible
• Hard disk Minimum of
  8.5 GB free space
• DVD drive DVD-ROM

Recommended System Requirements:

• Operating System Windows
  XP, ServicePack2/Windows Vista/
  Windows 7
• DirectX 9.0c (will be
  installed if required)
• Processor 2.5 GHz
• RAM ≥ 2048 MB
• Graphics card 256MB
  (for medium texture settings)
  1024 MB (for high texture settings)
  • nVidia Geforce 8800
    or better
  • Radeon HD-2900 or
    better
• Sound card ≥ 4.0 channel,
  DirectX 9.0c compatible
• Hard disk Minimum of
  8.5 GB free space
• DVD drive DVD-ROM