The Longest Journey attempts to return to the roots of the adventure game genre and does manage to do a half-decent job. The game's story combines elements of science fiction and fantasy to create its own interesting universe but one still heavily reliant on a number of clichés. The main characters are alright but not stellar by any means.
The game uses 3D character models against pre-rendered backgrounds. The models are alright if low-poly and the backgrounds are rather stunning. However the combination of the two is not seamless or even very clean for that matter. Also some of the character animations are just lacking in any kind of depth. On the whole I hated the pre-rendered cut-scenes which in my view were just plain ugly.
Audio wise the game was very competent, the voice-cast is nice and memorable. The soundtrack was appropriate but not particularly great.
One of the most annoying aspects of this game are the insane amounts of dialogue that one has to bare. If this wasn't bad enough much of the dialogue doesn't really have to do with anything relevant so skipping a piece here and there undoubtedly will not hinder your gaming experience to a great degree. The main character also doesn't say anything relevant for much of the games. Running to a walkthrough is hardly uncommon with adventure-games but thanks to the utter lack of information in the game itself, this tends to happen with Longest Journey a lot more than it should.
Additionally the skip-feature is also annoying since it not only skips actions but dialogue as well and the feature should have been implemented a lot better.
In all, The Longest Journey is not a stand-out game in the genre. It's an okay adventure with a fairly good plot, but has enough irks to make me not want to even bother with the sequel.
The game uses 3D character models against pre-rendered backgrounds. The models are alright if low-poly and the backgrounds are rather stunning. However the combination of the two is not seamless or even very clean for that matter. Also some of the character animations are just lacking in any kind of depth. On the whole I hated the pre-rendered cut-scenes which in my view were just plain ugly.
Audio wise the game was very competent, the voice-cast is nice and memorable. The soundtrack was appropriate but not particularly great.
One of the most annoying aspects of this game are the insane amounts of dialogue that one has to bare. If this wasn't bad enough much of the dialogue doesn't really have to do with anything relevant so skipping a piece here and there undoubtedly will not hinder your gaming experience to a great degree. The main character also doesn't say anything relevant for much of the games. Running to a walkthrough is hardly uncommon with adventure-games but thanks to the utter lack of information in the game itself, this tends to happen with Longest Journey a lot more than it should.
Additionally the skip-feature is also annoying since it not only skips actions but dialogue as well and the feature should have been implemented a lot better.
In all, The Longest Journey is not a stand-out game in the genre. It's an okay adventure with a fairly good plot, but has enough irks to make me not want to even bother with the sequel.