User Reviews (1 - 11 of 25)

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Don't even bother....

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: October 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is one of the worst games I have ever played. First of all, I like games that make you think. This game is completely predictable. If you don't figure out something right away--you won't have to worry. Your cursor will figure it out for you. There are only a few logic puzzles, and even those are too easy. And if you like visiting the same locations over and over in a game, then this one's for you. I give it a 1 out of 10.

It Never Worked! I Was "Jacked"!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: April 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Why did I waste my hard-earned shekels on this ca-ca from Adventure Gaming? I have a state-of-the-art Gateway desktop but the game always locked up tighter than a frog's sphincter at the menu screen. I had to unplug my main power cord to break the stranglehold on my computer every time I tried to click on 'New Game!' Their Technical Service had me jump through numerous hoops (install new drivers for my cutting-edge Nvidia graphics board, uninstall/reinstall, shut off programs during install, etc. etc. blah, blah, blah). Nothing worked. Save your money and in my humble opinion be wary of Adventure Gaming's future offerings. You've been duly warned.

Dead End

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

At the beginning of this game you feel like you're really going to solve a mystery but in places it gets really tedious and leaves a cliff hanger at the end. I don't recommend this game, save your money for something like Syberia or Tomb Raider.

The Adventure Company Drops the Ball

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: June 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The Adventure Company has a knack for taking high concepts and making them into terrible games. Take for example "The Mystery of the Mummy", a Sherlock Holmes mystery game that made the world's most famous detective seem insipid. As lousy as some of their attempts have been in the past, high concepts keep players coming back to The Adventure Company. "Jack the Ripper" has a concept so ideal it seems impossible to ruin, and yet the game is phenomenally atrocious.

The game is set in New York City in 1901. A couple of poverty-stricken showgirls have been murdered in a fashion similar to the Jack the Ripper killings of 1888. Jimmy Palmer, a nave young reporter, is assigned by his editor to write a series of newspaper articles on the killings. As Jimmy looks into the murders, he discovers that the same serial killer might be responsible for both the 1888 and 1901 murders. There's the high concept. The game play is from the first-person perspective of Jimmy from beginning to end. It consists of returning to the same locations and talking to the same people repeatedly, using dialogue options that aren't really all that optional. Occasionally, Jimmy can collect items such as keys and money to appease stubborn suspects. There are only one or two actual puzzles in the entire game.

The game parades many characters based loosely on actual suspects in the real-life Jack the Ripper murders, but Jimmy never seems to come any closer to solving the mystery. A game called "Jack the Ripper" should at least guarantee a creepy ambience, and the game seems to succeed in that area initially, but it soon becomes apparent that ambience isn't enough. Menacing footsteps when no one is following you, whispered dialogue that is unintelligible and unimportant to the storyline, and shady characters that can't be interacted with and don't contribute anything to the plot become annoying after a short while. In one room, a hushed, secretive whisper resembling "I can sell you the most beautiful radishes" can be heard repeatedly. Dark, blood-stained alleys lose their creepiness after a while. The score is beautiful and unnerving, but it only adds to the misleading feeling that something frightening is going to happen, and it hardly ever does. There are also several moments in the game where Jimmy appears to have a psychic connection with a raven, leading to trippy graphic sequence with no pay-off.

Many critics have noted the series of Irish folk tunes performed by one of the game's characters as a bright spot. The songs themselves are beautiful and haunting, like the game's score, but the animated performances that accompany them are less varied and more mechanical than a floorshow at Chuck E. Cheese's. Also, be warned that there isn't a twist ending, just an anticlimactic one. Maybe someday still The Adventure Company will redeem itself. In the meantime, avoid this game.

Major flaws in this game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: March 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I'm vacillating between two or three stars on this game so maybe it should be two and a half. The story is pretty obvious - Jack the Ripper or a copycat is in New York in 1901 killing off prostitutes in what the game calls the "Lowside District" of New York. Why in the world the developers decided to call lower Manhattan the Lowside District is beyond me. Or why the Pinkerton detective agency is called the "Pinterten" Detective agency. Or why a deranged raven shows up at the crime scene of a couple of the murders and then disappears until the very end of the game when you hear the words, "Nevermore, nevermore." What's Poe got to do with this game? They even have a story line about the World Series which didn't even exist in 1901.

OK, but all that aside what drove me the most crazy about this game was that it was very linear. You have to keep going back over the same locations over and over because something wasn't done in the correct order. In the final chapter I ended up visiting every location three times. The only positive note is that navigation is easy. It you want to leave a location, just right-click and the map comes up so that you can visit another spot - again and again.

The graphics are pretty good. There's really isn't an abundance of dialogue but the acting is fine. The music is something I rarely pay attention to - in fact if there is an option to turn it down I usually do because it interferes with the speaking voices and I find it annoying. This game did not have that option and there was only one time that the music was a problem. There really aren't any puzzles - just when to use inventory items in the right place at the right time. They were pretty straight forward. There was one timed sequence in the morgue that I actually thought was kind of a bit of sick humor - I had to use a walkthough for it. I never would have figured it out myself.

After all that - the ending. It was terrible. Absolutely awful. All that detective work (reporter work actually)for nothing. I expected some big confrontation between the reporter and the villain or the heroine to be in actual danger and saved by the reporter - nope. Nothing, except a stupid, "Nevermore, nevermore."

What the...?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: June 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The game has an interesting story, and the setup as a writer who is on the ripper's trail is pretty good.

However, the game's technology is outdated, and its implementation overly buggy. Also, the gameplay itself is extremely dull. But I played through it all because the whole "Jack the Ripper" story kinda intrigues me anyway. Now I do not want to spoil the game for you by telling you the ending, but really, there simply isn't much to spoil. It was not worth it at all.

This is one of those games with a real story. It makes you wish that there were more games with a story like this. But then you realize how bad this is actually implemented and you kinda lose hope for the whole genre...

If I were you, I'd steer clear.

Very disappointing

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: March 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I had heard about this game before it came out and how it was so great and all. Well this game could have come out 7 years ago and looked the same. It's very archaique, the graphics are quite blurry, the animation is not good, since you don't really move around freely but click in a section of the screen that takes you there if you can. After you click it takes you to the next scene, it's not linear, it's just frame after frame. You don't have that much freedom in the game, it's not like you can go talk to anyone you want or try things that could seem cool. The game is too easy to play too, i don't even think the atmosphere is that great, it's just plain boring.

I usually love role playing games and i'm very interested in jack the ripper, and thought the two put together would be a great combo but it's a huge disappointment. With all the technology that's available today, the creators of this game could have come up with something a whole lot better. I would have rather spent 10 or 15 more bucks and gotten something decent. I guess you get what you pay for.

Hope you like to repeat yourself..

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: September 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Since other reviews touched on gameplay and it's graphics, I just want to say this...

1. Sure, your surroundings are a pretty picture.. but I like games that are interactive. I want to go through drawers, look closer at pictures.. do something besides run around busy rooms that you can do nothing but run through.

2. The plot is weak. I won't spoil the story-line, but each in game day you pretty much go to the same places, talking to the same people. You have to meet certain requirements to make the game progress, and non of it is interesting.

The one thing I did like about the game, there are a couple real nice songs you can listen to while you play, or just wait in one of the bars and listen.

Unfortunately, I got this as a present for my mom, thinking it would be a puzzle game and be creepy. Buzz, wrong!

What a let down

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The music was good. That is all I can find good to say about this game. The ending was very disappointing to me. What a let down. The game play itself was boring and dragged on .

Dull, But Playable

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

New York, 1901: the seedy "Lowside" disctrict is rocked by a series of killings that resemble the London "Jack the Ripper" murders twelve yearas before. You play James Palmer, a young reporter for the New York Today. Your boss assigns you to cover the crimes and produce a series of articles that will regain sales lost to your paper's competitor. When your articles start receiving attention, you begin to hear from the killer, himself. Can you trace the hints he drops and prevent another murder?

_Jack the Ripper_ (JTR) is the kind of game that will be familiar to Adventure Purists: one with many fine points, one that has incredible potential to be remarkable, but one that had obviously no been given the time or attention to rise above the mediocre. It's perfectly playable--mildly entertaining, even. But when game developers complain that Adventure doesn't sell, they need look no farther than games like this to find the cause. JTR is boring. I personally don't think that games need lots of action, threats, and timed sequences to be exciting-and, except for one, you won't find them here. But neither do you find very many interesting puzzles, engaging characters, inspiring conversations, great locations, or much of a plot.

The game has its good points. The graphics are nice. The music is actually superb. The navigation and gameplay are smooth and easy. The voice acting isn't bad. The structure is well thought-out. But there just isn't enough going on. Each "day" of the game presents you with certain tasks, and I always was surprised when the day came to an end; I never felt like I had actually done anything. Part of this was because the puzzles were so very easy. Ninety percent were conversation; the rest were a smattering of incredibly simplistic mechanical and inventory, with one timed activity. I had downloaded the U-Hints file for this game, but the only time I ever looked at it was at the end, when I thought, "Is that IT???" In general, I found the puzzles so unchallenging that at one point I resorted to translating a book in French that my character found, just for something to do.

There are numerous red herrings in this game--threads that turn into nothing, places you can go where nothing happens. I suppose this is a realistic representation of investigative journalism, but I found it tiresome. There was also a strange plot element involving a raven and what seemed to be psychic phenomena that was never explained at all.

I disliked the save-game feature. This gave you a limited number (16, I think) of spaces to save thumbnails of your game in progress. 16 slots were about half the number I wanted, and the thumbnails were so small you couldn't tell what they represented. As your game was saved by time and date only, with no opportunity to label them for yourself, this was an irritation.

JTR was also pretty glitchy, particularly in the early portion of the game. Several cutscenes did not run properly and had to be skipped out of. Conversations overlapped and the navigational cursor sometimes didn't appear. Once the game crashed entirely--good thing I had just saved!

The ending of JTR is a disappointment. I realise that the real Jack the Ripper was never verufiably identified, so it would have been going out on a limb to identify him here. But I would have preferred that to what I got. The way the game ended was like the rest of it: wimpy and without challenge.

This game took me about 15 hours to complete, playing a couple hours a night. It was mildly entertaining, as I said. But probably better to wait for the jewel case release.

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