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Good for a pleasant afternoon, but not much more.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 55 / 56
Date: September 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Despite the picture on the box, most of the scenery takes place in Czech Republic, followed by small bits in France and Mexico. The storyline becomes apparent during the game play, and is not difficult to follow, even if you pay attention to a television program instead of this game. The play involves talking to people, finding objects by mousing over them, combining and using objects in the inventory, and solving a few puzzles.

The good parts of the game:
.The graphics are pretty good, and include rain (lots and lots of rain), a bit of snow, and realistically walking people.
. The puzzles are easy enough to solve without being a pain or a bore.
. You can't get lost anywhere, because the game will not let you either use the wrong items (match on the map to burn it up) or get lost, because you can't go too far without performing certain tasks or finding certain objects.
. You can turn this game off and go to bed without an aching to get back.

The bad parts:
. The game sometimes hangs, usually if there is another program running in the background.
. The tasks can be tedious and annoying, such as talking to a certain person, then another person, then back again, then walking away for a bit, then walking back and talking again.
. The characters have odd accents - there are several cockneys, and the bad guys sound like Sean Connery. The main character, Martin, has a deep, pleasant voice.
. If you miss a bit of dialogue, or even an entire conversation, you can't go back and play it again, unless, of course, you saved the game just before that point.
. The grammar, punctuation, and spelling in the dialogues are severly lacking.
. Every so often Martin exclaims, "I'd better get out of here quickly" as he saunters off slowly. Luckily, everyone else is even slower so he easily gets away.

Yawwwn...another dull play by Adventure Company

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: September 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game definitely has nice graphics. The story is so-so just like the "prize" ending sequence, really lacks mystery and intrigue. I'm not a fan of Syberia (although loved the graphics) either and I liken this game to it. There is no challenge when getting around the game, I like to call this "hot-spots-for-idiots". Like another reviewer said, a nice afternoon of play. Why an afternoon? Because if you could get the character to run it would take about an hour rather than a few hours. You have to paaainfully watch ol' Marty walk like a slug to the next hotspot. There are a few puzzles but only one is somewhat challenging. Repetition is the basis for the "challenge". I did not experience crashing issues running on Windows XP with SP2 which is definitely a plus. Since there is such a lack of good adventure games out there, you may just get this when it sells for cheap. Amazon has changed their policy on who can sell which is bad if you like to recycle games like myself. Grrr I gave it an overall 2 stars but based on stable gameplay and graphics I'd give it 2.5 or a C+.

Pretty Good Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: October 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Pretty good game. Last 2 puzzles were pretty hard for me. Took me awhile and had to go on the internet to get hints to finish. Good graphics.

Disappointing....

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: November 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Have previously played MISSING from the Adventure Company and was hoping the puzzles in this game would be similar. HUGE disappointment. Very few puzzles - possibly six total - and most of them were pretty lame. Required very little thought.

A lot of mindless babbling on the part of the "hero." A big "time filler" perhaps. Also a lot of back and forth with characters which also seemed like a waste of time. Beat the game in three sessions (about six hours total) and the ending was lame.

Skip this one... buy MISSING if you're looking for intellectual challenges.

Foul language

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 17
Date: November 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The game overall was entertaining and the graphics were pretty good. This game took you to different places all over the world so it's a long game and I liked that. The main draw back is the language. Beware parents, there is some strong language in this game and I feel the rating 13 and above is a little slack. I particularly did not like the use of God's name in vain. It didn't add anything to the game and as a matter of fact, for me it took away from it. Not expecting this kind of language, I must admit I was shocked.

Frustratingly SLOW-Save your $$$

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: December 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

When I read the plot of this game i rushed out to buy it-unfortunately I didnt read further or I would have known that this is a POINT & CLICK game, and as someone else mentioned, the main character moves from here to there at a snails pace. I wanted a game similar to Myst, where you are the P.O.V. and you could go anywhere and look at anything. Not so with this game, you can only go into certain hot spot areas, and only pick up and examine certain items. You watch the main character as he slowly walks to and fro, repeatedly having to go to the same place, leave, go back, leave, go back again. UG, maddening!!!
There is no way to speed up the action either. Can watch TV and play, and not miss a thing. BORING!!!

Easy and Beautiful

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 24 / 24
Date: December 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Martin Holan is a young archaeologist working at a rather boring research project when his uncle, also an archaeologist, calls to tell him of an interesting discovery. Roadworkers in Prague have unearthed a WWII-era bunker. Its contents have interesting implications for uncle's lifelong work. Will Martin go check it out?

NiBiRu is a lovely point and click game from the people who brought us Black Mirror and it shares many of that game's strong points while having overcome some of the glitches. The sound and graphics are beautiful, of course. The voice acting is quite good. The many characters have a variety of accents --appropriate, as Martin is the only American in the game-- and they are all quite understandable and realistic. Incidental music only appears from time to time, but is low-key and interesting enough not to be annoying. And other F/X, such as storms, traffic sounds and the like, give fullness to the gaming experience. Pre-rendered locations are nicely detailed, although there is less animation than in Black Mirror. Characters are believable, rather than super-real. Movement is somewhat limited, but what there is works.

Puzzle-wise, NiBiRu is extremely easy. Most of the puzzles are inventory-type, with only about half a dozen discrete mechanical puzzles thrown in. Of the latter, only one was at all difficult, and that one was VERY difficult; I worked at it for probably six hours over the course of three days before giving up and consulting a walkthrough for the answer. There was one other sticky place with an unlikely solution that you pretty much had to stumble on by chance, as Martin gave no clue what he was thinking. There were a couple very easy timed puzzles (I got through them without a problem on the first try) and one place you could die (I only found one, anyway). However, at that point if you died, the game automatically reloaded right at the beginning of the sequence, without playing any annoying "consequences of failure" sequence. So you could try over and over again without too much frustration.

There are a couple things to keep in mind while playing this game. First, as in Black Mirror, you have to right-click as well as left click on every hotspot, as well as every item in your inventory, as this might reveal more information. Some people have a very hard time keeping track of this; it didn't bother me. On extremely rare occasions, you can't pick up inventory until you know what you need it for (or at least have visited the location where you need it). On the other hand, there are several tasks you CAN do without the faintest idea why you're doing them, before you have all the necessary parts. This can lead to a lot of wandering around and head-scratching. You can't replay or revisit dialog, but I didn't see any reason why you would have to. I liked that the dialog took care of itself; that is, once you clicked on a topic your characters just conversed about it until they were done, without your having to click on interminable conversation trees. I also liked that when a task took time--as when Martin had to wait for something--a clock simply appeared and ticked around the dial a couple times; then the game proceeded. This did away with the problem of wandering around looking for something else to do to advance the action.

The endgame showed up pretty abruptly and there wasn't much you could do but watch it unroll. I think I would have liked the possibility of a couple different endings, or more possible interaction. All in all, NiBiRu played more like a piece of interactive fiction: fairly linear, with a predetermined outcome the gamer could not influence much. After a brain-bending, puzzle-heavy game, it was a nice relaxing change of pace that took me about 15 hours, maybe less. If you like classic point and click, you'll like this one.

Great story..

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: December 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game had a great story line. It was very interesting and easy to follow. It was medium in length and kept my interest through the whole thing. The graphics were gorgeous, I was quite pleased with it.

The down side is that the puzzles are almost impossible to figure out (most of them anyway), I had to cheat a lot to finish it. That is why it only gets a 3. If the puzzles made more sense it would have been a much better game.

A few flaws, but not bad

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The actual story of the game doesn't really draw you in in the beginning, however through sheer will and stubbornness, I completed this game in one day. (Not to mention a lack of a social life)

The start of the game has you, Martin Holan, an archaeology and linguistics student called to visit your uncle in France. He has a rather ambiguous project for you to complete and unfortunately, it remains ambiguous even up until the end. The story was a little slow and confusing at times with an ending that left much to be desired.

Graphics were pretty nice and the scenes and sound effects were amazingly realistic (think Syberia, but less snow)

Now as far as the vocal actors were concerned, I was a little disappointed. Our hero, Martin, is a little hard to form an attachment to, as he continues to state the obvious and sometimes talks like he's trying to be a "loose-cannon cop on the edge". Not very tough, just comes off dorky and grating. You get used to him after a while though. As for the other characters, their accents border somewhat on the ridiculous. Take Uncle Francois for example, I still don't know if he was German, French, English or Turkish.

Nibiru is a pure adventure game, which means no combat, just a lot of logic puzzles. Some of the puzzles were next to impossible but you can find solutions to all of them on the web. Anyway, for fans of this genre, and for people willing to spend 19.99 for roughly 8+ hours of gameplay, I'd say Niburu is a good choice.

Nibiru - great game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I LOVE adventure games so I had to play this one of course. Nibiru is fairly easy and fun to play. It has a lot of puzzles and reminds me of "Black Mirror" very much so. I also played Black Mirror and this was my favorite after Syberia and Syberia II. Ahhh what can I say. If you like all the above you will have fun playing NiBiRu. You won't find anything super hard and the game won't let you continue unless the puzzle is solved. I played it pretty quick but had fun..... great graphics. But hey - that is just me.

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