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a let down

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: December 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

i was expecting something commensurate with the reviews and awards this game received. i was a bit disappointed. initially the storyline is mysterious and intriguing -it really sucks you in, but instead of developing, it trails off and fizzles. the ending is abrupt and a HUGE anti-climax. its like one of those movies that starts off well but then goes nowhere and just suddenly ends. most of the puzzles (if you want to call them "puzzles") rely on you being on the look out for obscure things to click on -rational and logical thought wont help you very much in this game. the dialogue and the relationships between the characters are corny, bordering on just plain stupid. to be honest, i tried playing the longest journey, and i didnt like that game very much either. The two games are quite similar, so you may want to ignore this review if you have different taste. to its credit though, the game does have stunning backdrops and an impressive soundtrack. for a while it even sucks you in. i didnt really have any technical problems. I ran the game on a laptop, there was some graphics glitches but it was still playable, i think there were some minor sound issues aswell.

WOW!! Breathtaking

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: May 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is the game that got me hooked on adventure games. The scenery is ABSOLUTELY beautiful. You feel like you're right there. The GA's did a really good job with it.

The story itself is a really interesting story. Both Siberia 1 & 2. They were interesting, but I have to say (perhaps it was cause I was not used to adventure games when I first played) it was really a difficult game. I had to use a walkthrough for most of the important parts of the game. Oh sure, I'd pick up a piece of information here and there that I knew what to do with...but for the most part...if I missed one little piece of the puzzle, I'd have to go back and figure out where it was hidden. Then the lightbulb would come on and I could go back, take care of that part/get that piece of info, and then finish the scene.

All I can say is "thank goodness for walkthroughs" but "WOW that's gorgeous scenery!"

Disappointing but still decent

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: October 15, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I had read such wonderful reviews about this game on "justadventuregames.com" as well as several other places, that I was probably expecting too much. And the graphics ARE gorgeous, no arguments there. But... the story failed to live up to its early promise, and the ending was extremely abrupt and a letdown... I felt bored many times, and the game only took my husband and me about 15 hours to play. We consulted walkthroughs about 4 times, and 3 of those simply had to do with not being able to see a lever very easily... And the protagonist, April Ryan, I mean Kate Walker... well, let's just say that I started playing The Longest Journey for the 2nd time (I am not a big repeat gamer) immediately after finishing Syberia just because I felt lonely for April's humor, and humanity... I couldn't get attached to Kate for some reason.
This game just left me feeling empty and let down, and -literally- searching for something better to play!

Buy The Longest Journey or Darkened Skye instead! (mmm I could go for some Skittles even now...)

Read this; it's incisive

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: February 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I've scrolled through most of these reviews and can't say I disagree with any, no matter how they rated the game. Yes, the "sets" are lovely (but static) and, while the story is pretty absorbing, it ultimately does little beyond setting the stage for a "Syberia 2." My main problems were with the interface and the characters. If you compare this with a *really* richly textured game with good characters (my touchstones are the Tex Murphy and Journeyman games as well as Longest Journey), Kate's ability to interact with her world is a little thin. The dialogue menu and many of the responses remain the same (as opposed to, say, Tex Murphy, where they add in new dialogue choices as you "earn" them) so you have to keep clicking on the same 5 or 6 choices to get the one that gives you the info you need (and where the new material ends up is not always logical). The 4 or 5 choices with no new info (including one with a sophomoric pick-up artist at Barrockstadt) end up being tedious because some of the conversations are quite long and frequently pointless, and they always get repeated. The characters, unlike those in the other games I mentioned, are uniformly unlikeable. Other writers can pick characters like this and somehow make them endearing (or merely eccentric, or at least really sharp villains) while most of these, including Kate and her friends and work relations, have little to commend them. From the write-up, I was expecting her "guide" to play more like the AI Arthur in the Journeyman series; instead he's more neurotic than Woody Allen and comes off as a wimp with no initiative who does little beyond make the game more tedious. I have to admit I did like the ending; being forewarned may have made it seem less abrupt. Kate has obviously changed quite a bit at that point. I just feel that the writers violated the basic writers' credo of showing rather than telling till that moment; Kate's friends comment that she seems different, but she'd still being pretty abrasive and shallow when it comes to interacting with her world. And, yes, like many others, I found the build-up to finding the land of Syberia without a commensurate payoff *really* irritating (although the final scene really is lovely and touching). I'll probably play Syberia 2 for the sake of closure, but I won't pay full price.

Average...Main Character Unrealistic

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: March 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I wanted to like Syberia. After all, I purchased two copies of this game and it had great reviews. Unfortunately, I think its reputation is overrated - I found Syberia to be a rather drab, boring and implausible game with an annoying protagonist and gray graphics.

First Off: the characters: you play Kate, a Lawyer with the spine of a jellyfish a verbally abusive boss and a dink of a boyfriend. Kate is an unrealistic character. This woman is supposed to be an attorney, and yet she wanders around wearing side-stitched painted on leather pants and a windbreaker to meetings with clients? Ugh. The model itself appears emaciated and resembles a teenager rather than an adult. Plus, there's her personality: Kate is a pushover, and can easily be convinced to play errand girl for every weirdo in town. Does this sound like an American attorney? Hardly.

Then, there is the graphics. Can we say GRAY. Of course you can. Because in Syberia there's almost no other color. Unless its black. The graphics try to outdo eachother for a hardcore 'industrial look' which I found appalling and tiresome. Apparently there are no blue skies in Syberia world.

Models: The character models were okay, except minor characters have extremely BIG heads. This makes them look cartoonish next to the main character.

Puzzles: Some of these are fun, but most of them are simply strange and don't fit into the story. You find puzzle pieces in bizarre locations with no explanation. Its sort of silly.... Gee...Where's this key? Lets go look in location x, all the way across town... Hmmm.

I guess I'm overall just disappointed with Syberia. Given its rave reviews, I expected it to be fantastic. Instead, its just merely average.

Magical Mystery Tour

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: August 23, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Great adventure with no shoot-em-ups. Action required to move to next step made perfect sense, acting of characters was superb, and the visual is exquisite. I can't wait for a sequel.

An exciting adventure about a lawyer needing a signature...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: August 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The first thing you need to know is that "Syberia" is only the first part of Kate Walker's European adventure, so if you are expecting to end up on the fabled lost island of Syberia by the end of this PC adventure, you are going to be disappointed. I saw a couple of reviews about "Syberia II" that got me interested in playing that particular game so of course I picked up "Syberia" first. I do not take the time to play a lot of these games, but when I do I like these sort of adventures where you go around and collect items, endure endless conversations, solve some tricky puzzles, and eventually uncover some sort of mystery.

The heroine here is Kate Walker, a sophisticated New York Attorney who is sent by her firm to Valadilene, a smal alpine village in France, to buy-out an old factory, the Voralberg Toy Company, which was once world famous for making automatons. Of course once she is there Kate is confronted with an unexpected twist the turns her business trip into a journey heading east in order to get a signature needed to complete the deal. Kate's journey consists of three additional locations after Valadilene: the university city of Barrockstadt, the forgotten city of Komkolzgrad, and the once lavish seaside resort of Aralbad. Her only companion, once she gets him up on his feet, is Oscar, one of the Voralberg automatons, who will be the engineer for the mechanical train that takes Kate on most of her journey.

Oscar is the most interesting of the supporting cast of characters, although he is a stickler for the rules, especially about having a ticket before you can proceed from one station to the next. Most of the other characters get a bit annoying, especially as you go through the unavoidable pointless conversations you have to endure in this sort of game. It is the nature of the game that they are always impediments to either Kate's overall mission or her specific task at hand (or both). There are also several dead end characters, where you keep thinking at some point talking to them will be of some importance, but that never proves to be the case.

Then there are the phone calls that Kate gets from back home, where her boss, mother, boyfriend, and supposed best friend harangue her about not getting her mission done and back home as quickly as she can. Apparently we are supposed to be watching Kate turn from a boring lawyer into an exciting adventurer as she meets her various challenges. Of course she is the heroine of "Syberia" so we tend to think of her as that from the very beginning and keep looking for a way to get her to dump boyfriend Dan as soon as possible. Of course, you cannot get so annoyed with these phone calls, especially those from Kate's mom, that you do not pay attention to what is being said, because there are some clues there as well. But overall the phone calls tend to detract from both the adventure and Kate as a character.

The best part of "Syberia" are the graphics, which are pretty stunning. There are nice details to each of the settings, all of which are run down to various degrees. I like the way the water ripples and the fact that at one point we can see a soccer game being played on a television set in the background. The music by Nick Varley and Dimitri Bodiansky is also pretty good, with a fairly memorably title theme and some nice Russian/Gypsy influence bits as well. Most of the tasks are rather mundane but fairly logical, which worked out well for me because I only got super stuck three times in the game (until the very end, where suddenly how to use simple objects like a screwdriver were suddenly an almost insurmountable task). Those tasks involving automatons are more interesting and that motif, along with that of mammoths, are also enjoyable aspects of the game. The hardest task, for me, was mixing a drink, but at least once you get through that things move pretty quickly in the end game.

In fact, I was rather surprised when the game ended. "Syberia" comes on two discs and you play with Disc 1 in your DVD-drive and I kept waiting for the point where I had to switch discs, like in "Phantasmagoria" and the Gabriel Knight adventures. My biggest complaint, such as it is, would be that you cannot quickly skip across screens when you have to travel from one end of a train station to another or across town. You can make her run a bit, but some things just take time. I was not especially enamored of games where you get to do 360 degree turns (they make me dizzy at times) so I have no problems with this more traditional way of moving the character around.

The bonus disc includes a short "movie" on the making of Syberia where B. Sokal and others at Microids in Montreal (they speak French so be prepared to read subtitles), both a trailer and a teaser for the game, some examples of the transition "From 2D to 3D," and a nice collection of desktop wallpaper. For each of the four locations of "Syberia" you have a choice of wallpaper that you could put on your desktop to record your journey through the adventure and remind you that there is some reason Kate is carrying around those metal shears.

The bottom line would be that hardcore adventure game fans are going to find "Syberia" too tame for their tastes. But for the occasional PC game player or even the novice, this inventory/adventure game should be quite enjoyable. Plus, everything I have heard is that "Syberia II" is better.

Picturesque, but otherwise forgettable

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: June 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I'll start off with the main good point about this game: the graphics. A lot of detail was put into it, and everything is very picturesque. It's really quite amazing, and it really gives the game an immersive feeling.

The only down side about the graphics is that they're all pre-rendered, and the angle and distance from Kate can change dramatically from screen to screen. It can be somewhat disorienting.

That's it for the really good stuff. The other aspects of the game weren't terrible - but it's obvious that they spent most of their time on getting the graphics right and just threw everything else together.

Characters: all 2 dimensional, they don't do much to inspire any emotional attachment. They tried valiantly to give the main character, Kate, some depth - but they failed miserably.

Their main technique was to keep interrupting the gameplay with useless boring phonecalls from Kate's boss, fiancee, best friend, and mother. These little side stories were so irrelevant and uninteresting that you have to wonder what they're doing there at all. But you've got to pay attention, because there's 1 clue hidden in all those meaningless conversations that will play a part later on in the game.

Even her arguments with her fiancee lack any sense of emotion. Her well-hyped "personal journey of change" seems wooden and contrived.

Story: There isn't much of one. Basically most of the story line simply involves misadventures in trying to wind a clockwork train.

There are also inconsistencies that suggest that more than one person worked on the story and they didn't fully collaborate. For example, we find out in Anna Voralberg's diary that she felt guilty for convincing Hans to climb that rock which caused his accident. But later in a more graphical recollection we see that Anna councelled caution and it was Hans who insisted on doing it.

Those are small things, I know, but it shows that they didn't pay as much attention to the story as they did to the graphics.

Here's something gratuitous to think about: in one part of the game your stuck in Komkolzgrad because some creepy guy has stolen your atomaton engineer's hands. He needs them to play with his oversized organ.

Gameplay: Most of the puzzles involved little more than checking for clickable areas all over the screen. The most annoying part was missing a clickable area and getting stuck. It happened to me a few times when I could have sworn that I tried everywhere. Sometimes just a small area missed was important.

And there was a lot of running back and forth. You basically just had to sit back and watch kate make her way to the edge of each screen at her own pace. Even though the views were picturesque - I ended up getting really sick of them.

Conclusion: Okay, I know I've put a lot of effort into my little complaints here, but don't think that means I didn't enjoy the game. Even though I won't be bestowing it high honors, I found it a decent way to waste time.

This game is good as a diversion to while away the time with. It's not good for too much more.

Syberia -- good backgrounds, bad just about everything else

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 14
Date: December 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Although this game contains beautiful scenery, it is largely a waste of the user's time. I bought this game with the hope of spending time figuring out some puzzles without the usual murder and mayhem. Unfortunately, the head-scratchers in this game are few and far between, and the 3-year-out-of-date-interface and primary character's annoying neurosis made me long for the game's final climax. It took 8 long hours to get there and wasn't even remotely worth it.

This game is supposed to be about a smart, New York lawyer solving a mystery that ends in Siberia. Instead, you never arrive in Siberia, and your character turns out to be a neurotic wreck with serious issues with her mother, best-friend, fiancé, and employer. Not to mention these other extra characters call you during the game constantly, but generally add nothing material to the plot. To top the game's list of issues, she never actually accomplishes her main task: arriving in Siberia. To find out what happens to this doormat of a character Dreamcatcher Interactive actually wants you to buy the sequel.

This game is now a coaster.

FInally! They get it right

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: February 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

An old fashioned adventure game. I mean a real adventure game. No shoot em ups, no ridiculous puzzles that don't make sense... just a really great game. Deserves the game of the year award.

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