User Reviews (1 - 11 of 56)

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Schizm first impressions

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 20 / 42
Date: April 14, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is going to be a great game! If you enjoyed Myst and Riven, you'll love this adventure. Be impressed by the graphics of the 2 avi files on www.p3int.com, as I did. 360º, 2 characters controlled by you, a great story... this is SCHIZM.

Schizm DVD please.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 22 / 38
Date: July 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is being released primarily on DVD-ROM. In fact it was MADE for DVD-ROM. The CD-ROM version offered here for pre-order is very scaled down and not equal in quality. I am eagerly awaiting this game to come out...I would love to pre-order the DVD version of this game--if it were offered.

Schizm DVD

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 24
Date: September 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I too would like to pre-order the DVD version. It looks like a wonderful game and I'm anxiously waiting. However, I'm not going to settle for the CD version.

Schizm DVD release

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 21
Date: September 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I've just started to play. As far the game seems to be an excellent Myst-like adventure. Stunning graphic (despite 640x480 resolution), 360 degree view, 4-point 3D sound and good storyline make it a real time-thief. Only thing that really annoys me is the quality of cut-scenes. Acting (wooden indeed) and animations (especially the first one!) should be better.

And I was looking forward to this. To be specific...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: November 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well, the main reason I'm writing this is because there seemed to be a large lack of pride of the programmers, and it is reflected in the game.
----- Pride. In the flimsy booklet, and in the install procedure, you see that they will, and I quote, "gladly replace any disc free of charge, whether accidentally damaged or due to manufacturer defect." But, the very next sentence states that you have to send $8 for S&H [that's over 25% of the purchase price] and $2 for each extra disc [and again, that's even if it is damaged by the manufacturer, as stated. I mail CDs all the time for work... it costs about 75 cents... do they package it in lead? `Free' has taken on a new meaning, as has their `warranty'.
Moving to the game itself:
----- Characters. The voice actors were awful [probably my biggest negative, and hard to explain in type]... painful to listen to them... almost wanted to cut sound off and read subtitles. Listening to the woman 'heroine', I was just crying for Imoen, Charsi, or April Ryan. Wish they had spent the extra dollars and went with real actors. the guy hero... well... where's garret [or even Mr. Freeman or Max Payne] when you need him? [granted the actors may be very nice people, but they don't have game quality voices]. Actually, Jim Raynor would have been fantastic for this role.
----- Game settings... you have two settings: music volume, effects volume [oh, and subtitles on/off]. That's it. and the sound effects? Marginal. No video settings to tell the game "my system should have a stewardess on it, so throw as many triangles at the screen as you want." No video check, either. Nope... lowest common denominator, I suppose [which left it too blocky for my taste].
----- Interface. You can barely hear the walking sounds (so you don't know whether you're walking, or whether you're on a motorcycle, which seems like the case with the speed you move from room to room. But, that doesn't matter much, because you really don't have much control over where you can walk to... when you click to walk, you go automatically to where they want you to go, so you might as well just clip to there. There's not much looking around... stuff is either right in front of your face, or you don't get to look at it... but most scenery that you'd like to check out isn't available [plenty of doors on huts, etc, that are simply pretty scenery, even though you're right next to them and you're supposed to be investigating what's going on]. I'm left wondering, such as in the big lebowski, what's the point? What's the point of having all that scenery and what not, when there's a stiffly few things you can look at, and despite there being lots of `stuff' around, you can't investigate it. It's as if there's puzzle A, and you need to solve puzzle A, and other than that, that's it. Once you do that, you move on. Why even have a game interface or story? The walking was somewhat similar to Riven [and the year it came out... no progress, which is what I was hoping for].
Sure -- the backgrounds are somewhat nice, but stick to dl'ing some pretty wallpaper and you'll have the same.... artwork on your desktop you can't do anything with.

Schizm: Mysterious Journey

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: November 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Why aren't you offering the DVD version of the game? It is available from Dreamcatcher--but they have been having problems at their website and it is impossible to order either on the internet or by phone. One wonders if they have this much problem with their ordering process, how good can the game be. ???

Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: November 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I don't mind the graphics or interface of this game, but I do find the puzzles both trivial and frustrating. I don't much care for games that require me to keep detailed notes of obscure symbols, sounds, etc., some of which may be useful later. (I recognize that there are people that do enjoy this, and consider this a mark of a good game -- I'm simply not one of them. Since I don't usually play a game all at once, but over the course of two or three weeks, I find this process tedious.) I finally went to a walkthrough and, frankly, I never would have figured out the solution to the first puzzle. I'm not an idiot, and have played many of these kinds of games before, but this one is, in my opinion, not worth the trouble.

Not as good as I had hoped

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 25 / 27
Date: November 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

(...)P>I started out liking this game a lot, but as it progressed, I liked it less and less. What I really look for in a game is a first-person perspective, a plot or story that you have to uncover by solving a variety of puzzles, not getting killed, good graphics and decent sound, pretty much in that order. While I found all these things in Schizm and they were enough to keep me interested, the game had problems enough that I became increasingly angry and frustrated with it.

Schizm was designed for DVD and it shows. The CD-Rom version not only has less of a game, but also does not run particularly well. Panning is slow. Sound halts and stutters. Sometimes the game freezes altogether. Allegedly you can correct this by using the full install, but about every time I tried this, the install procedure crashed my computer. The one time I managed to get it fully installed, the game ran in Hungarian or some other Eastern European language, so I had to go back to swapping discs anyway.

This game is complex. Sometimes it seems arbitrarily complex -- that is, the complexity really interfers with enjoyment of the game. The two character perspective starts out as intriguing but just becomes a pain as you can't ever move them at the same time, but have to keep going back and forth between them even when they're supposed to be together. Several times this involved swapping discs half a dozen times in the space of thirty seconds of gameplay. They come up with a lame plot element to explain this, but it's still a drag, especially since there is no zip feature to speed you past places you've already been. A zip feature would have been very helpful.

The puzzles range from somewhat hard to extremely difficult. Often the difficulty stems less from mental capacity needed to solve them than from some arbitrary complexity that just seems put there to make the puzzle hard. For example, several puzzles contained so many variables that even when you knew the logic involved you still had to spend an inordinate amount of time going through the variables to find the one that worked. Some indication of the correct path would have been helpful. (Spoiler)

The sound puzzles in general were ill-conceived. I really think if you're going to have sound based puzzles in a game you should make the sounds thins like tones or bells or rhythms, or even snatches of music -- things that are easily recognizable. Trying to understand an alien language that sounded like badly recorded backwards masking was just too much.

There were a lot of inconsistencies in the alien culture, as well. Why should you use one set of number symbols in one place and a completely different set in another? Because things were often so different from place to place, I, at least, had the feeling that I never really learned anything and was making no progress.

There were a lot of things in the game I got that just didn't function. Mission logs that were supposed to be accessible were not accessible, characters who were supposed to appear did not appear. Fortunately everything that was absolutely necessary to the progression of the game happened, but I was in a constant state of anxiety that I would miss something vital.

I was interested enough in Schizm not to quit, but I spent a lot of time in what seemed to be pointless busy-work and I never really felt like I knew quite what was going on or how to proceed. I like non-linear games, but at times Schizm seemed so non-linear as to be incoherent.

Probably this is not a game that is going to keep you completely absorbed far past your bedtime, but it is a good game to play for a couple hours, then put away and come back to later.

I wanted adventure, but I got lame puzzles

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 20 / 32
Date: November 08, 2001
Author: Amazon User

At least in Riven (which I also grew tired of), there was a sense of "being there," of exploring a mysterious, beautifully detailed world. I bought the CD version of Schizm, which was the only version for sale at Best Buy, dutifully loaded all 5 CD's, and was appalled at the low quality of the video. No sense of reality, no immersion. I KNEW I should've bought Myst 3, dang it. But the truth is, the puzzles in this "game" are what I'd expect to find in a newstand puzzle magazine. And I don't find those interesting, either. I'm a programmer, and I live to solve logic problems. So why don't I like Schizm? Because, based on the game's own description of itself, I was hoping that it would be more of an adventure, filled with discovery, wonder, and mystery. As if you were truly stranded on an alien world and trying to figure things out. The only game I've played like that is Thief II, which is WONDERFUL. You interact, you figure things out, you knock a few guys out here and there with a blackjack, and meanwhile a great story develops, PAINLESSLY. I can't wait for Thief III to come out...

This game was nothing more than an interactive screensaver wrapped around some lame puzzles. Very disappointing.

This is the second Dreamcatcher title I've bought. The other was Cydonia (now called Lightbringer, probably to throw people off the track who have read bad reviews of Cydonia). Lesson learned: if it says Dreamcatcher, avoid it all costs.

I discovered something! DO NOT BUY THE CD ROM VERSION!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 11, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Apparently, according to the games creators (of which there are 6 working to an extremely low budget) the DVD version carries 9.6 GB of data compared to the CD Rom versions 2.3 or so. Hence, many scenes and areas were cut and some puzzles lft out. It also comes on one disk rather than five or so.

The graphical quality is far superior, but that won't change anything unless you're a fan of games such as Atlantis and Myst 3. Like puzzles that'll keep you scratching your head forever? Buy it!

If not, then why'd you even think about buying it in the first place? Fools!

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