Indigo Prophecy
Submitted Sunday, October 30, 2005 - 10:20:41 PM by Klaitu
A game? Sure. A movie? Perhaps. A masterpiece? Almost. Indigo Prophecy is a unique kind of game that you really don't see very often. It's an intersctive story game that relies mostly on plot, but also does not ignore gameplay.
I suppose you might consider it closest to something like Rise of the Dragon or Heart of China. Games that haven't been made in years. Indigo Prophecy Is a truly refreshing burst of Creativity an an otherwise mudane market of clone games.
You start the game as Lucas Kane. You're in a restroom, and you've just murdered a man.. but you don't remember doing it. What will you do? Will you try to cover up the murder? Will you run out in shock? Will the police catch you? Did you really murder that guy? What the heck?
The game is composed of 240 or so scenes, and actions you take in each scene affect the rest of the game. For instance, if you choose to hide the murder weapon, then when you play as the investigating officer in scene 2, you'll have to find it. If you chose to getaway vis Taxi, your transit record will turn up in the police station some 70 scenes later. It makes it quite difficult to remember all the things you've set up, because you don't just play as Lucas Kane, you play as the police as well.
The game has spectacular graphics. They're looking a bit dated, being on a current-generation console, but they're in top form for the hardware. That emotion engine they were talking about when the PS2 came out gets a workout. The characters in the game do a lot of their performance via emoting.. and it works. You can tell someone's mood by their facial expressions.
This is largely an intellectual game, not a great deal of action. The most strenuous things are the fight scenes. You basically follow an on screen color dial with the analog sticks and repeat the patterns to succeed.
If this game really has a weakness, it's that the first 75% of the game is rock solid, while the last 25% is a bit farfetched. In more common terms, it starts out being like Blade Runner, and ends up being like the X-Files. The end of the story is unsatifying, and completely ridiculous if you've been paying attention.
Nevertheless, Indigo Prophecy should be held up as an example of how to make an amazing video game that does not involve jumping over lava, aiming a cursor at aliens, or facing off one-on-one in a ring. This is the kind of game that needs to be made for people to take video games seriously.
I highly recommend this as a buyer. Playtime is about 10 hours, so you could rent it too.
Overall Score: 9 of 10
Here's the back of the box, just for cool points:
It's not that Urban Reign looks bad or plays bad, it merely IS bad. There's absolutely nothing new here that I haven't done a hundred times before.. and with over 100 missions, there's a LOT of nothing I haven't already done before.
This game pretty much plays identically to X-men Legends 1. The developers attempted to improve the game in some ways, but the real problems from the first game rear their head in the second game as well.
