A
New Beginning should be a slam dunk. It should be a veritable
feast for adventure lovers. And in many ways, it’s just that.
But alarming shortcomings in key areas keep this great-looking game
from being the top-flight title that it should be.

Let’s talk about the good stuff first.

To begin with, this is one good-looking game. I mean, seriously good-looking.
The format is third person and the gorgeous comic-book-style visuals
really pop on the screen. The character models are detailed and convincing,
and every location has a rich feeling of atmosphere and detail that
will remind you of some of the best third-person adventures of the
past.

The
visual presentation is also excellent, using comic-book panels and
animation to create a kinetic and compelling flow of story and information.
Good use of dynamic
parallax in particular helps bring the superb 2D art to life.

If you were walking by someone playing this game, you’d stop
and ask him/her about it. It’s that pretty.

Next, the plot: Who can resist time travel stories? Well, I certainly
can’t. Time travel is a time-honored theme in adventure games.
Who can forget the wonders of Timelapse
or even the more low-rent delights of Beyond
Time and Ark
of Time?

The
plot setup is grim but exciting. At a point several centuries in our
future, mankind faces obliteration due to ecological collapse. In
a desperate move, several teams of scientists use time travel technology
to retreat into the past and try to change the events which led to
their current dire situation.

The game takes you on a globetrotting adventure, giving the artists
a field day depicting all sort of environments that range from pristine
and unspoiled to eerily devastated. This visual variety adds a great
deal of enjoyment to the gameplay experience.

More
good stuff: The game also has good, solid puzzles. They are very traditional
third-person adventure puzzles, mostly inventory- and dialog-based.
Pay close attention to what the characters say (including the one
you are playing) and you shouldn’t have too much trouble solving
the puzzles. One word of warning: the puzzles do reward the
patient pixel-hunter. This can cause an occasional puzzle solution
to feel a bit more obscure than it probably should.

Another fun thing about the game is that you get to play two characters.
The first is an unhappy scientist whose work on environmental engineering
could hold the key to mankind’s salvation. The second is a young
time-traveling scientist who must convince the environmentalist to
help her. This adds to the dynamic feeling of the rich plot, in a
way reminiscent of the Broken
Sword series.

The
game is also meaty: It’s broken into chapters and the story
the game tells is substantial. You get the feeling it would make a
good novel or science fiction movie. The story feels like it matters;
you really get a feeling for the high stakes involved.

And did I mention the music? It’s gorgeous!

In fact, everything about the game suggests big budget, classy production
. . . until the characters start opening their mouths. If only the
dialog and voice acting were up to the high standard set by the game’s
visuals, story, music, and presentation.

Alas.

The game suffers from every cliché sin that worst foreign
games commit.

First, the translation into English is quite poor.

There
are also points where dopey writing really undermines the good elements
of the story. Here’s one example: Early in the game, the character
you’re playing faces a dire situation with another character.
She’s hurt, badly. She needs immediate medical attention, which
he can provide. But before he can administer this help, he gets a
phone call.

Which he takes. (Seriously?)

Who’s on the other line? His therapist, of course,
who really, really wants to talk. You know, about your character’s
feelings. Now, in any remotely real-life or real-life-adjacent
situation, you wouldn’t answer the phone to begin with, but
if you did, the moment you realized it was your therapist you’d
immediately hang up. Instead, your pinhead character wastes
precious minutes yammering with the doctor, too polite to exit the
conversation abruptly. It’s the kind of device that might work
in a farce, but in a life-and-death situation it just seems tone-deaf
and stupid.

But
there’s more. There’s a key character who is so aggressively
awful and unpleasant that it makes you want to turn off the game.
He’s an authority figure who’s so hostile to the player
character that it’s not only difficult to listen to, but it
makes utterly no sense in the scheme of the story. If you were putting
a team together for a mission the entire world was depending on, would
you really staff it with people you had open contempt for? That’s
just silly – and obnoxious. And it brings a shrill tone that no game
needs. How annoying is it? It reminded me of the first ten minutes
of Ring
II (a game the developer actually apologized to
me for).

Finally, the voice acting is atrocious. Not only did the production
hire bad actors, but they clearly recorded their dialog in isolation,
without any context from the surrounding lines adding clarity to the
performance. There are consistent line readings with the stress on
the obviously wrong word or phrase. This makes listening to the dialog
awkward and unenjoyable.

I’m
sure JA+ readers are sick of hearing me say this, but there’s
no excuse for bad acting in games. None. Zilch. Nada. When
you lavish attention and talent on the visuals and story line of a
game, but then dismiss the acting portion of the game as an afterthought,
you undermine all the good work that went into the good parts of the
game. It just makes no sense to me. Actors are always desperate to
work, and any city where you’re making a game has a community
of actors who would LOVE to be in a computer game. And if you don’t
believe me, developers, I’d be happy to prove it to you any
time. Give me a couple of weekends and a studio and I could produce
a better set of vocal performances than this game provides in my sleep.

However.
I’m willing to admit that, given my acting background and movie
fixation (I’ve written a newspaper column about the movies for
the past twelve years), it’s possible weakness in this area
of a game could bother me more than it might bother other players.

So if you’re willing to overlook weak dialog and appalling
voice acting, and focus on the very real and vivid strengths of this
title, you might just have a great time with A New Beginning.
But then again, you might not.

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
• Processor: 2GHz Single
  Core / 1.8GHz Dual Core
• RAM: 1GB RAM (Vista/7:
  1.5GB RAM)
• Sound card: Compatible
  with DirectX9.0c
• Graphics: OpenGL 2.0-compatible,
  min. 256 MB graphics memory
  (ATI Radeon or Nvidia Geforce recommended)
• HDD: 3.5GB free disk space
• DVD drive, mouse

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.