Developer: Interactive Binary Illusions / Red Sprite Studios
Rrp: £ Free (Gog.com)
Point and click adventure games and I have have long and fairly complicated history. I’ve been playing them for as long as I can remember and have very fond memories of trying to complete games like Universe, Monkey Island and Discworld. The thing is for every good one there are twenty that fail to hit the mark, and I get the feeling that even at the time of its release that quite a few people felt that way toward Flight of the Amazon Queen.
I think what makes the game so infuriating is in part the user interface (though it’s most certainly not the only thing). The damned thing is just so cumbersome and unwieldy, in part due to the fact that the developers decided to use pictographs to indicate the buttons rather than just write the words for the various actions. For comparison Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was released three years before this game and yet its user interface is no where near as obtuse as Flight of the Amazon Queen’s.
On top of the awful control system is the voice acting… It’s not good, it does well enough to get across the point it desires but the actors voices seem to range from uninterested and dull right through to hokey and cliché. It’s quite impressive actually.
So yeah, I didn’t like this game at all. I’m glad I got it for free because I would never want to pay for this. However should you want a ‘zhuzhed’ up version with improved graphics you can get a copy for your mobile device, no idea if it’s free though.
