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Poor

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: January 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

the reason I say poor is the game had a glitch. quite often the screen was white and one could not see how to move around esspcially the outside scenes. All in all it was a complete ruin. I hope to get a copy of the game that is not ruin they need to check for quality control.

dislike the game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: February 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I played the game three times and I cannot finish it because there is a glitch. At the end when I should get 3 endings, I get nothing and I cannot continue. I have not missed anything since I use a walkthru but when I check the journal there is one item not crossed out, but it was completed. I will never buy a game from the adventure company again!

No players tutorial and Gets Old FAST!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 10, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game was fun, but there were significant downfalls to it's layout:

PROS:

Excellent mystery soundtrack

Good acting from 14 of the 15 characters (the american woman with the accent that drifts in and out of a southern twang was the only letdown)

Good LONG gameplay

Extremely original plot

CONS:

REDUNDANT BORING SCENERY: I am the sort that doesn't typically LIKE to play games all the way through with a walkthrough. However after a short beginning, the scenery remained the same through the ENTIRE length of the game. Your character is on a five-car train, (restaraunt car, baggage car, salon car, and two residing-compartment cars). Without a change of things to look at, you will find yourself endlessly searching and REsearching the same brown/gray rooms on the train, ALL of which look identical with the exception of the passengers' luggage atop the racks. Once you find your list of clues, there is a short cinematic break, and you start all over again, interviewing the same list of characters, and searching the same rooms again for the next list of clues that spawned themselves after the last round. If the same old repetitive sceneries and gameplay styles don't bother you, then this shouldn't be an issue. I myself, like variety.

NO TUTORIAL: There was no tutorial, so from the get-go, it took a while just to learn how to move the character, go in and out of the inventory, inspect things, etc., and it wasn't until about 15 minutes to the end of the game I finally discovered that if you quickly double-click a doorway or direction, it will skip past the slow "step, step, step, step, step, step, turn doorknob, swing door open, walk inside" thing, and just allow your character to appear in the next room. Information that certainly would have been handy in the BEGINNING of the game.

INVENTORY MENUS: Combining items is a pain, and without a tutorial or any leads whatsoever, you wouldn't even know HOW to combine items. There is NOTHING in the game from the very beginning to the very end that explains the use of your inventory menus. I was well into the game before I knew that combining items was even possible, and that goes for reading your documents, studying the passenger passports etc. Your character will say things like "I will save this in my scrapbook for later use", without any way of knowing what the scrapbook is, how to gain access to it, how to flip through it once you've found it, yada yada, list goes on...

GAME-MAKERS ASSUME YOUR'E A ROCKET SCIENTIST BY NATURE, (you know, as most PC gamers are...): There is an extreme lack of guidance in certain areas where the game expects you to do things that without any REAL LIFE knowledge of criminal investigations, you would never know to do... For instance, there is a part where you are supposed to make a radio work to contact the outside world. After looking it up on the internet, I discovered that you have to place the bowl on the table, fill it with orange juice, put a small statue in it, wrap the statue in some bent copper (which you yourself had to custom bend from a passenger's bracelet, which you don't know how to do, because of the lack of explanation in combining items, the inventory menu thing again), and connect that to the radio, and then custom bend a butter knife, and pound a nail into the end of it to make a makeshift SOS transmitter key, and then connect some wiring back to the radio. Ahh, remember the good old days in college under the guidance of all our criminal justice professors, when we learned how to fix a radio with a fish bowl, orange juice, statue, copper bracelet, electric wiring, butterknife, hammer and a nail? ALWAYS a useful technique in the detective business... I guess I wouldn't have been irritated with the unlikely radio-fixing peice of this story, if there had even been ONE HINT ANYWHERE IN THE GAME that this was the solution to fixing the radio, ex., A "When Technology Fails" book on the shelf with hints for fixing broken electronic appliances out of household items, or, a letter found from someone, to someone, about items that are useful in fixing things... Just assuming that the gamer knows enough about electronics to put THAT ridiculous combination together was only one of several crazy assumptions the game-makers made.

Overall, this game would be best played from the beginning with a printed-out walkthrough at the ready. Still worth playing I suppose, but only for the amount I paid for it, which was a little over a dollar. Even if the lack of guidance weren't an issue, the dialogue and SAME scenery throughout would not be enough to capture most people's interest long enough to figure out the mystery, which is sad, because the first fiteen minutes are a real hoot.

Not worth $30

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: December 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

As a fan of mystery games I was looking forward to this game. However I was very disapointed. Aside from the awesome graphics and cool narration, it was boring. It is full of mundane tasks (go get the parasol, collect all the passports, they need napkins to wipe their fingers before they let you print them). Also like someone mentioned, the sequence in which you would get items, clues, etc. was way off. The ending is the best part. It took me about a week to beat. It's just not worth $30 bucks. $20 would even be pushing it.

If You've Ever Read The Book, Be Prepared To Be Bored

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: March 15, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Ok - I LOVE LOVE LOVE this book and the British movie with Sean Connery, et al. So I think - cool - I can play a game that will have some of the same beautiful settings as the book/movie. While this is true - the graphics are good and the overall look of the game is nice - the game play is HORRIBLE. Once I figured out all the characters are exactly the same as the book and the plot is exactly the same, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach about the $30 I had just spent...

Good Things -
* There is an alternate ending that the game makers have added in to at least add a little bit of interest to the finale.
* Some of the puzzles take a little bit of thought to figure them out.
* Pretty pictures and engaging play keeps you interested.
* You tell the gathered suspects how the murder happened at the end based upon your clues. Be sure to review all your clues before Poirot is carried into the Salon Car to reveal the murderer.

Bad Things -
* Game is very linear. There is no veering from the track that is set for you. There are several places where you HAVE TO solve certain puzzles before you are allowed to go on. However it is often hard to know if you are done investigating or not.
* Some of the puzzles are infantile in simplicity and 2 of the puzzles are SO HARD that there is no way to solve w/o downloading the cheat. I'm not kidding - one of the puzzles you will never get in a 1000 years. This seriously detracts from the game play.
* You play a game with Poirot (who is bedridden with a bruised ankle during much of the game play) to see if you can figure "IT" out with little or no help from him. This should be a positive. However, in many parts of the game you don't know if you are done until you come back to talk to him and if you aren't, he docks you. Not really fair. And at the end, the game doesn't give you any kind of score or whatever to gauge how well you did.
* If you know the book, you know the plot, who did it, and how it's solved. This fact makes the game play simply a job to get to the end.

I really wanted to like this game, but it's hard. 95% of the game play is just dull plugging and chugging and searching for clues or solving easy puzzles, while the other 5% is impossible - not a great combo. I doubt I'll by "And Then There Were None" either based upon the game play of this Christie game.

Unless you have NEVER, EVER read this book/seen the movie, look somewhere else.

many problems

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: December 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Well, I was a huge fan of "and then there were none", but there were a lot of problems with this game. I was totally and completely confused throughout the middle and end of the game, because characters were talking to me about items that I hadn't even found yet. I was wondering, "am i missing something? I have no idea what these people are talking about!" and then I would search a room and find the item a little later. It is very difficult to figure out how to move forward in this game. I was stuck for a week at one point just figuring out what to do next. It doesn't lead you through the game very well as it did in the first Agatha Christie game.

It was also very hard to keep track of the character's names at first. There are about 15 characters, and when they were talking about eachother, I didn't know who they were talking about because I couldn't keep the names straight. For instance, if I was searching Col. Arbuthnot's room, I didn't even know which man he was to go back and talk to him!

Finally I found the end very confusing. There are a lot of things that the game still didn't explain. Overall, I was very disappointed with this game, and I hope if they make another one, it is a lot better.

A major disappointment...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: January 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I really wanted to like this game; after all, I enjoyed "And Then There Were None" despite some flaws. But this game was simply bad from the get-go.
For one thing, there are very few puzzles; most of them are ridiculously easy, although one radio puzzle forced me to try random combinations until I finally worked it out. Either way, I didn't get a feeling of satisfaction from solving them. It also made for a very short game (less than 10 hours for me).
Secondly, this "game" is really more of an animated movie than a game. You spend most of your time tracking down your suspects and then patiently working your way through the dialogue tree until you've exhausted their information. It's incredibly tedious, especially because most of the dialogue is word-for-word from the novel. I appreciate the respect they showed the book, but seriously, if the game isn't any different from the book then there's no point in playing.
Which brings me to my biggest complaint with the game: the "original" ending. "And Then There Were None" had a genuinely different ending which made sense, and which you could figure out through the clues. I don't want to give away the ending to "Murder on the Orient Express," but I will say that adding a single twist to the ending is an infuriatingly cheap way of creating a "new" ending. And if that weren't irritating enough, you really don't get to do anything for the last half hour of the game, as Poirot sums up the case and occasionally tosses you a multiple-choice question just to make sure that you're still awake.
High points: David Suchet as Poirot; most of the other voice-acting was good, and the backgrounds were lovely
Low points: Poor gameplay, too short and easy, ending likely to disappoint fans of the novel

Very Disappointing

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 29, 2008
Author: Amazon User

My wife and I are fans of adventure games, but MOTOE (and it's previously released sibling, ATTWN) are sorry excuses for the genre. Much of the game play is tedious, and the puzzles are illogical (although slightly less so than ATTWN). After giving this 2nd part of The Adventure Company's Agatha Christie series a chance, I don't expect we'll be wasting money or time on any future installments.

Enjoyable Game, A couple of Software Glitchy things

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: February 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Loved the game, was annoyed by some of the glitches. The storyline is interesting and the puzzles were fun to solve. The software design could have better thought out as if you solved a puzzle ahead of where the game thought you should have, it seemed to get stuck. I actually had to load earlier saved games and redo a couple of sections. That sort of thing takes away from the fun.

Talk, talk, talk

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game has beautiful music and pretty good animation. However, it is a game based on way too much talking and not enough action and puzzle solving. Took too long to load between sections and the puzzles were either super easy or completely out of left field. Had potential, but due to the lack of gameplay, I was pretty disappointed.

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