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Syberia
II
Score: 7.0 / 10
The adventure game is dead…long live the
adventure game. Since Sierra got bought out and Lucasarts swore
themselves to make endless Star Wars games, the beloved point n’ click
games of the late '80s and early '90s but become almost extinct. In
America, anyway - leave it to the Europeans to pick up the slack, as the
genre still holds some commercial pull over there. One of more notable
releases by them was 2002’s Syberia, created by French comic book artist
Benoit Sokal. While it doesn’t quite the pinnacle of genius found in
classics like Monkey Island or Kings Quest, it’s a good meal for
starving fans to enjoy.
The original game, released for the PC and at a discount price for the
Xbox, starred Kate Walker, fancy pants lawyer from New York. Venturing
to Europe to purchase an old, outdated automaton factory, she realizes
that an heir exists, and thus she
cannot close the deal. In her search for
his heir, one inventor named Hans Vollberg, she gets swept up in the
magic and mystery surrounding automatons, fanciful creations that are
similar to robots, but operate with gears as opposed to computers.
Unfortunately, automatons have become outdated and useless due to the
marches of technology, but Kate (and you) find something magical
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about these creations. The first game ended with Kate catching up to
Hans on his final journey to a mythical land known as Syberia - a
summary video exists for those who never played the first one. This land
is filled with blue grass and giant mammoths, and while most people
think of it as a fairy tale, Hans is reasonably sure it’s real. Syberia
II picks up with Kate accompanying the aging Hans on his final journey.
For the most part, it's standard adventure game fare as Kate wanders
through towns, talks to people, solves puzzles by running fetch quests
or finding keys. The backgrounds are all prerendered, although all of
the characters are polygonal models. Given that most of these types of
games were meant for the PC, translating the interface to work with a
console hasn’t always worked. Syberia II falls to the same sort of
problem. Kate is controlled with the analog stick, a task easier said
than done given that there appear to be invisible boundaries preventing
you from walking on certain locations. Which you be doing a lot, because
Syberia II loves giving tasks that have you sauntering from one end of a
given map to the other, then back again. The sizes of some of the maps
are tremendous, so the very process of just getting anywhere takes
several minutes.
But the interface problems don’t end there. Whenever you walk next to
something that Kate can interact with, a little icon in the lower left
corner lights up. Finding the hotspot for anything proves to be an
aggravating task of fiddling back and forth, and the game never tells
you exactly what you’re targeting anyway. If you have two doors right
next to each other, it’s hard to tell which one Kate is looking to open.
Once you've come to grips with exploring it, you'll notice the world is
finely detailed, with each town lovingly rendered in gorgeous CG, and
this is probably the brightest point in the game. But this is where
another problem with the game design creeps up – there’s no “look”
command. Perhaps I’m too used to older games, but I’ve always really
liked checking out bits of landscape or scenery to see what the
character or narrator had to say about them. This is entirely absent in
Syberia II. Worse yet, the world is filled with bizarre contraptions,
and you have no way of knowing what they actually are without a
description. It’s an incredible shame that such a visually deep world
lacks such necessary details. Sometimes the high-res text can prove
troublesome, depending on your setup, as the font is awfully small,
especially the conversation options.
Much of Syberia II is spent talking to the denizens of the world. You'll
meet tons of interesting and quirky characters, including the lovably
neurotic automaton Oscar, but the protagonists are hardly involving.
There’s a lot of backstory involving Kate and her reasons for leaving
her life behind to follow Hans that should be intriguing, but she’s an
awfully bland person and doesn’t seem to have any characteristics other
than being an American and a woman. Hans, too, the nutty old inventor
you spend the entire first game chasing after, comes off more as an
craggy lunatic who’s following a dying dream. Which is far, FAR less
interesting than one would expect from someone who invented the wondrous
machinations at the heart of this series. The writing is competent,
although not all it could be. The game, translated from French, comes
off better than some Japanese RPGs, although it lacks the pizzazz of
native English. The voice acting is also reasonably decent, although the
stiffness of the text comes through a bit more when spoken.
If you’re a fan of adventure games, staying away from Syberia II is like
refusing to drink water in the scorching desert because it’s not cold
enough. They’re so rare that even the average ones are worth playing,
and this is definitely better than anything that’s come out within the
past year or two (and well beyond the last Broken Sword game that came
out for the Xbox). The retail price point of $20 certainly makes it
worth it, as long as you can put up with the interface hiccups and the
multitude of slow points. People interested in catching up on the glory
days of the genre may be better served to pick up Curse of Monkey Island
for the PS2 – longtime fans will at least find an amusing diversion with
Syberia II.
