User Reviews (41 - 51 of 97)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

GK3: Highly Disappointing

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: January 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

While I found the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau very interesting, if I'd had any idea what the rest of the game was going to be like, I would have just read a book on the subject. To try and phrase it without any real spoilers.. anybody who prefers Grace to Gabriel, or is interested in the building romantic tension between Gabriel and Grace, content yourself with the first two games--which I felt surpassed this one in almost every other area, as well. Frankly, if I still had my receipt, I'd write Sierra and ask them to give my money back.

Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: November 28, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Honestly, as a GK fan I was expecting far more than this... THe first two games were great. Compared to the first two, GK III is slow and boring. It is also kind of self-serving--some of the things you have to do are random and there is no way to think of them by yourself. If you decide to get it, make sure you also find a good "hints and cheats" site.

Waste of Money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 17
Date: February 13, 2000
Author: Amazon User

As much as I loved GK2, The Beast within, as disappointed am I with GK3, Blood of the Sacred. Why on earth did Sierra go from real actors back to drawings only? Endlessly boring, bad graphics, and a "Schattenjaeger" Gabriel Knight who is simply appalling and shows none of the charming characteristics his "real" persona had in GK2. All there is left is some macho who looks like Barbie's Ken on even more steroids. Buy GK2 instead!

A unique sequel to a wonderful series

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: August 01, 2000
Author: Amazon User

The first Gabriel Knight game was about a voodoo cult in New Orleans, the second was about a werewolf murder in Germany, and the third is about vampires. In this episode Gabriel sets out to solve the abduction of a man's child and crack the mystery behind an age old Vampire cult.

The pros of the game are the graphics and controls. It's really great to be able to pike the camera at whatever angle you want and examine things. Everything is rendered so the screen is more than just a backdrop that you can't peek behind. Almost everything is something you can examine closer.

The puzzles are also logical. They make sence instead of being wild things like ripping the leaves off a plant and combing them with a rubber duckie or some other hair-brained idea. I also loved the animation. For polygon rendered people and buildings they were impressively handled.

There were only two things about this game that I have any sort of beef with. Firstly the character of Gabriel seemed to have lost a bit of his tact and charm. In the first game Gabriel could charm the pants off of just about anyone he met and could smooth talk his way just about anywhere he pleased. Although the voice actor was the same man as the first GK game he seems to have forgoten Gabriel's smooth cajun accent for a horribly sounding southern drawl.

And also the game didn't seem to like my ATI graphics card, so although I had the game for a couple of months I wasn't able to play it until I upgraded my card to something else.

But that aside, I'd still reccomend it to any adventure game fan in a heartbeat!

My opinion changed

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: June 17, 2000
Author: Amazon User

The first time block seemed sort of boring to me, but then the story began to pick up. The graphics were sort of choppy sometimes but they look a lot better on a full install with a three-d engine. Tim Curry's voice sounded wierd to me at first, especially with the southern accent, but then it began to sound like how Gabriel actually would sound. This game made me laugh too. It was funny to hear Gabriel and Mosely, two geometric little computer men talking like real guys. Gabriel's obnoxiousness started to seem funny to me too, with Grace to balance him out. I liked the tension of their romance, and I found the game to get very exciting from the time that the two scottish men arrived and Gabriel started following them. It was one of the best games I've played, I rank it right up there with the second Gabriel Knight. I hope they make a fourth one.

There Is Not A Word Good Enough To Describe It!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: December 09, 1999
Author: Amazon User

If I told you it was amazing, brilliant, excellent, or even perfect, you still wouldn't understand how great this game is. I have been a Gabe fan from the beginning and this tops them all. I know, it did take a while to come out (almost a year after it's given release date), but it was worth it. I've already played it 4 times (on 4 different computers, with no bugs!) and I want to play it again. One disappointment though, I didn't take 4 years of Spanish to play a French Gabriel Knight game. Maybe next time...

Continuing to Improve

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: December 29, 1999
Author: Amazon User

This is by far the best Gabriel Knight adventure to come. The puzzles are simple enough to be solved by those who don't like to think, but are difficult enough to keep people involved in the game. The new environment gives a whole new feel to the game and makes the player feel more involved with what is happening than ever. The many twists and characters constantly keep you guessing as to whom the kidnappers could be. I definately recommend this game to anybody who is a fan of the GK series. Let's pray that Sierra doesn't stop with this one.

Not perfect, but a worthy addition to the series

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: March 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

First things first--in my opinion, those who complain about the lack of "real" vampires missed the point. The GK series has always been about monsters, sure, but on several levels. It's about the darkness and evil within the villains that turns them into the "monsters" you battle (the second installment *was* called "The Beast Within). If this game had been just some garlic-waving, stakepounding action game, it would not have been a true Gabriel Knight game.

The storyline is engaging and intelligent, although anyone who has read about alternative theories for the legend of the Holy Grail will have it figured out pretty quickly. This doesn't take away from the gameplay, though.

What does take away from the gameplay is the clunkiness of the game itself. Although my PC met (and exceeded) all of the game's system requirements, I experienced frequent crashes, and the game's response time would sometimes slow down at critical moments when timing was very important, making what would have been otherwise simple tasks take multiple attempts. Also, the camera would sometimes get stuck in a corner when I needed to be looking somewhere else, and this got pretty frustrating. And though I was glad to hear Tim Curry again as the voice of Gabriel, I *really* disliked the 3D animation. It was just--fake.

Still, it was enjoyable enough to make me stick with it despite the technical difficulties, and for me to hope that Sierra reevaluates their apparent decision to abandon the Gabriel Knight series. I would like to see a GK4 someday.

Excellent

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: May 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Jane Jensen is one of the few games designers still around capable of creating an interesting point-and-click adventure game, the few other recent exceptions being the designers of Monkey Island and Grimm Fandango, and it is fortunate that Sierra kept her on even while they decided to destroy the adventure game division they built themselves upon and fire most of their best designers.

1. While most games have puzzles that have very little connection to whatever storyline they manage to put together (hi, Dreamcatcher), the puzzles in GKIII are very well integrated into a rich storyline. Some of them are quite difficult to figure out (you can always find hints on the net), but once you do figure it out you don't feel cheated for your efforts because the solutions always make logical sense (although you might have chosen a different tactic in real life). Jane's puzzles also involve more than finding different objects lying on the ground and clicking them randomly on hot spots. For one thing, the environment is too rich and non-linear for this to work. The player is actually rewarded for thinking.

2. The game environment is very rich. There are locations that aren't significant to game play, but are still fun to go back and explore and add to the overall experience. You can wander off and engage in conversations that you missed out on the first time you played the game, and each detail adds to the richness of the storyline.

3. The storyline itself is wonderful, based on the real-life mystery of Rennes le Chateau (read Holy Blood, Holy Grail for its history, or The Big Book of Conspiracies for a nice, short overview). Even without the puzzles, it is a fun, entertaining and educational interactive movie experience. (SPOILER WARNING: SKIP TO NEXT PARAGRAPH) Unfortunately, towards the end, when she strays from the known history of the Bloodline it gets a bit silly (it was not necessary for her to rewrite the "origin" of Jesus and create a silly one for the vampires in order to get the vampires into the story: they could have just found out about the Bloodline like anyone else and gone after the child for the special qualities of its blood).

4. The production values are wonderful (great soundtrack, great voice cast, etc.). My one complaint is that Tim Curry gets a bit silly with his voiceover at times, but it gets better as the game progresses.

Personally, I was disappointed by the graphics. The new emphasis on 3D environments in adventure games is saddening. While it does make point-of-view movement more interesting, the characters look like unreal homonculi and the architecture sometimes feels like you're playing Doom I. You never forget you are playing a computer game. It worked better with Grimm Fandango, where the characters are supposed to look inhuman and the environments are less navigable and therefore more fully designed. There is still something to be said for fully rendered graphics which allow artists to create more fully-realized environments. Perhaps 3D games will eventually be as interesting to look at as they are to move around in, but not yet.

I couldn't sleep until I finished it!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: April 08, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I've played all 3 of the GK games. The draw for all 3 games is that the writer takes actual historical events and interweaves them with the plot she's created in the game. I liked the addition of a computer database to the game; I spent several hours browsing through the available references (and probably not all of them!). You can really spend as much time with the references as you want; you don't have to read them all to finish the game, but I found them educational and fun. I also liked the character development of Gabriel and Gracie. I only hope there is a GK4 so we can find out how their relationship evolves. I have to say that GK2 was a bit scarier and had the "werewolf" theme throughout, but after reading all the reference material in the game, the "vampire" theme made sense. I can't wait for the next one---there are no other games like Gabriel Knight!

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next 

Actions