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Major flaws I'm not willing to overlook...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 20 / 27
Date: September 08, 2004
Author: Amazon User

First off, I want to establish that I've never played Syberia I -- and judging from the glowing reviews I'm seeing everywhere on the Web for Syberia 2, it may be a good thing. It seems that with every Syberia 2 review I've read so far, the author is carrying over nostalgia from the first installment. While I understand the sentiment, it's a no-no if you want to review something objectively.

The best features of Syberia 2 have been well-covered in game reviews, but they bear repeating. The graphics are nothing short of jaw-dropping; artist Benoit Sokal took any constraints he may have had (only so much you can do with snow and ice, you'd think) and somehow created one breathtaking scene after another. Time after time, a new scene would unfold and I'd just shake my head in amazement. Screenshots won't do any justice -- you have to experience these views when they're mixed with environmental effects like snow falling off tree limbs or birds fluttering past the camera. The music also fits the mood of the story perfectly; it's subtle yet thoughtful, exactly what you'd expect from a quaint Russian town in an arctic neverland.

Ambience and atmosphere are not a problem with Syberia 2. Even the story itself, though maybe uninteresting on paper, did manage to captivate me. In short, your goal as Kate Walker is to help Hans Vogelberg achieve his lifelong goal of reaching the (fabled?) land of Syberia, quite possibly to verify the existence of wooly mammoths. Again, not your run-of-the-mill adventure formula perhaps, but it does work well in the grand scheme of things.

Most of the characters are vivid and interesting; it's hard not to feel sympathetic for Hans, particularly after experiencing a "dream sequence" where you get a glimpse into his childhood. Even if he is bedridden most of the adventure, you get a real sense that he's involved in the story from beginning to end. There are a number of colorful characters that pop in and out of the story as it unfolds, from giggly Youkol villagers (Eskimo wanna-bes if you ask me) to cookie-cutter bad guys.

The cinematic sequences are, for the most part, moving and aesthetically pleasing. More often than not, when you solve a puzzle you are rewarded with a nugget in the form of a short movie. A nice feature is the fact that you can easily access these movies at any time once they've been shown the first time.

So we have a fairly riveting storyline, interesting characters, and breathtaking graphics. It's a mega-hit, right? Not so fast. True, you will have a difficult time finding any review of Syberia 2 that gives anything less than an A+, even though the authors admit the game has its problems. Well I'm sorry, but my standards dictate that no game deserves an A+ unless it provides what I'd consider a perfect gaming experience. Syberia 2 doesn't even come close.

My first complaint is underlined many, many times. Though it may not bother some, I simply could not ignore it. Think about this: when you first meet someone and learn their name, how long would you continue to address them by their first AND last name? Not long, correct? Well, from the very outset, when Hans and Kate (who are supposedly good friends) talk about their upcoming trip to Syberia, Hans finishes nearly EVERY sentence with "Kate Walker." "Yes, Kate Walker. We just need to wind up the train, Kate Walker." At first, I thought it was just an oddity with Hans, but then Oscar the Automaton followed suit, then Malka the little girl, then the patriarch in the monastery, then... and on and on. They ALL kept calling her by her first and last name! It got to the point where I purposely avoided dialog sequences because it grated my nerves so badly (until I realized some dialog was necessary to move the plot along). I find it damn near impossible to believe nobody at Microids noticed how odd the "Kate Walker" thing was during testing. It's frankly inexcusable and distracting.

Now, for the puzzles. Some of the brain-teasers were actually quite good, requiring abstract thought and an attentive eye. Others, however, are a hardcore case of trial-and-error (which I personally hate). On a number of occasions you will find yourself pressing buttons or plugging holes in different combinations until magic occurs. Or, even worse, you will find yourself running from Point A to Point B, then back, then again, then back, then again, until you've found the solution that works.

But that's not the worst of it. For a few select cases, the answer does not reside in logic at all. There are times when you need to move your mouse cursor over a small area of the screen, effectively hunting for a "hotspot", to perform a specific action. That's all fine and dandy, except many of these "hotspots" blend perfectly into the pristine artwork. You can spend days walking in circles because you failed to scan each and every screen, pixel by pixel, for a hidden hotspot. As a result, the game comes to a screeching halt.

My last real problem with Syberia 2 is linearity. Every item that makes it into your inventory will be used at some point. There are absolutely no red herring items, no subplots, no alternate/optional goals along the way. Also, with maybe one or two exceptions, you can only examine or touch those items which will be directly acted upon.

While linearity is almost inevitable with adventure games, there are ways to minimize the claustrophobic effect. In Broken Sword 3: Sleeping Dragon, you come across many items you'll never use, and you can examine darn near anything on the screen regardless of its relevance to the story. As a result, you really sense the world is open to possibilities. In Syberia 2, the mindset tends to be, "okay, what specifically does Microids want me to do here."

Frustrating puzzles, a finicky interface, and abundant restrictions put a sour flavor on this potentially delicious gem of a game. I regret that I can't join the masses who gush about Syberia 2 and gleefully overlook its major flaws -- I just can't.

Go home, Kate Walker

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: April 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

WARNING...SPOILERS...

Every time I dress up as a monk to sneak into a monastery where I'm not welcome, the first things I do are insult the clergy, then deface their art on the off chance that it might hold some clue I need to get something I need. If you enjoy doing these things as much as I do, then you'll LOVE this game!

The plot and puzzles in this game are so hokey, that I can't give it higher than two stars despite the absolutely gorgeous graphics. I am still in the early stages of the game, and I will ONLY continue because it's so pretty. Kate has become a whiner, and totally unbelievable as she goes so far out of her way to help a guy she doesn't even know. I can suspend disbelief, I swear, but only if I WANT to...I care so little for Kate's "dream" of helping Hans, that I just can't forgive how lame the story is.

Again, the artists who made this thing so beautiful should be commended, but that's the ONLY thing this game has going for it, and it's just not enough.

(By the way, I thought the first game was just as bad. And this time around, they didn't even bother fixing the things that made Siberia so tedious...YES, I'm talking about the fact that you have to walk through every scene 50 times to visit places in the right order. I made the mistake of buying the sequel before playing the first one, otherwise I never would have bought it! If you enjoyed Siberia, you might actually like this one as well.)

let down

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: June 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I thought that Syberia I was one of the best adventure games ever produced. Syberia II continues the story line and has superb graphics just like the first one. I believe more work should've been put into creating relevant, logical puzzles for the game. There were too many puzzles that required exhausting random permutations (rather than logic) to reach the solution, e.g., the fishing puzzle had 27 combinations, the 'heart' puzzle had 121 both with no apparent logic to the final solution.

I'm not disappointed that I bought the game; but I was expecting a better, fully thought out experince like in Syberia I.

not nearly as good as the first

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: July 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

the first syberia i really enjoyed, a few boring parts but in general, very nice. syberia 2 on the other hand is less than what i had expected. the main issue i have with this game is dialogue. lets face it, its terrible. for example, you talk to a girl in which she says her name is anna voralberg. when you talk to her next, your character says: "are you anna voralberg?" its things like this that bastardize a game. unfortunately, its like this throughout the entire thing. at one point your character is yelling and insulting a priest and right after that, youre calm and wishing him a good day. its poor planning in the dialogue department. oh, and another thing... the puzzles are weak. they seem like theyre going to be a chalenge, and its not... and other times your wondering "why the hell did i pick this up?".

Not nearly as good as the original

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I loved the original game, but Syberia 2 was a sad excuse for a sequel. If you havn't played Syberia 1 and you like adventure games, you need to. The graphics in both games are breathtaking and the plot is original and addicting. The puzzles in the first game were just the right difficulty and the characters were awesome.

The first thing I noticed in Syberia 2 was the lack of music that I think made Syberia 1 such an intricate and loveable game. The character meshes in the game constantly get glitches, causing frequent crashes. The new characters in Syberia 2 are cool (especially the `dog'), but it doesn't make up for the quality of the puzzles.

After playing the game through (I loved the story line) I found several puzzles that were basically trial and error, with no logic involved. Others required you to talk to someone about a topic 5 or 6 times even when you knew what to do without the dialog. Those puzzles weren't that bad compared with those in which you had to find microscopic hotspots that are often connected to one that you have clicked several times.

Other issues I encountered included: graphics bugs that caused frequent crashes even though I had all of the system requirements, Kate Walker was often rude and belligerent in dialogue, and a lack of puzzles that involve logic instead of luck or extreme amounts of time.

Is this a joke?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 15
Date: February 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If I wanted to see breathtaking scenary and no storyline, I would have went to the mountains.

The puzzles in this game are tedious and hardly worth anyone's time. The only thing keeping me going was the fact that I was finally going to get to see Syberia. From that little city, to the middle of nowhere (like the novel of Huck Finn) and finally to Syberia the game lacks any direction what-so-ever and the puzzles are those of repitition, not thinking.

I fell asleep during the playing of this game numorous times.

Save your money, buy a candy bar.

Quest left me cold

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 40 / 47
Date: July 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I used to be heavily into adventure games. This was back in the heyday of the Commodore 64, when Infocom was king. Those people really knew how to tell a story and make puzzling fun. Then the graphics revolution came, and adventures became more about pretty pictures than actual adventuring. I got tired of paying $40-50 for games that looked lovely but bored me. DOOM came along, I got into first-person shooters and I never looked back.

Well, I might have peeked once or twice. That's how this game caught my eye. It was reasonably priced compared to what I was used to seeing, and I remembered reading positive things about it.

I've found that not much has changed.

In this game, you play a lawyer named Kate Walker (an appropriate surname, since she does an ungodly amount of it) who has left her job to assist an elderly toymaker named Hans Voralberg in realizing his dream: that of reaching a legendary island called Syberia, where mammoths still roam. Basically you are his errand girl, making deliveries, doing maintenance, and retrieving items because he's too infirm to do it himself, and his robot companion Oscar is too timid and absolutely refuses to go out into the cold. Will Hans make it? Will you end up wanting to tell both Hans and Oscar to get lost and hightail it back to New York? I won't spoil it for you.

(I hadn't played the first SYBERIA game, but that was okay because this sequel - or continuation, really - comes with a cinematic recap.)

SYBERIA II is easily the most beautiful game I've played to date. The setting, a remote area of Russia, is a veritable winter wonderland, and the attention to detail is superb both in the graphics and sound. Snow slides off roofs to land with a satisfying "floomph," wildlife roams or flies in the background, old structures creak. Kate makes footprints that disappear as more snow falls. It all contributes to an atmosphere so enveloping that I forgot that I was playing it in the middle of summer. There are also some amazing and truly cinematic linking sequences.

The gameplay, however, is another story. The game is heavily scripted, which means you spend at least half the time talking to various characters. Repeatedly. In many cases, several times in a row. It's a very awkward and tedious way of moving the plot along. Why not at least have the conversation continue automatically rather than make the player keep clicking over and over again? As for the puzzles, they aren't so much difficult as simply obscure. At one point, you pick up a cleaning brush. (Why? Because it's there.) It's used to scrub away part of a painting in another room to find a clue. But why would anyone do that, or even think of doing it? There's no indication that the painting is relevant, unless you happen to run your cursor over the hotspot and see it change. That's just one example. A lot of the puzzles require you to pick up random items that seem to be of no significance, and which are very easily overlooked - and then do incongruous things with them. In one scene, you need to know how to operate a HAM radio, and the controls in the cockpit of a small plane. If you're not the game's creator, you're lost. Needless to say, I used an online walkthrough to get through most of it.

When you finally do get to the end of the game, it's so sudden you'll feel like someone pressed stop on a tape. It's a huge disappointment after so much buildup, though the animation is, as always, stunning.

It's a shame that so much obvious care went into the look and sound production and so little into playability. Perhaps SYBERIA II is better looked at as an interactive storybook than a game, though the story does need work. My recommendation is to wait for it to drop to a budget price, find a walkthrough, and enjoy the sights and sounds. Otherwise, it's frustrating.

The story was good, and the graphics were great. However...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: April 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I was eagerly anticipating this game; I loved Syberia and had definitely hoped for a sequel. I'm going to keep this brief because there are already plenty of lengthy reviews, but I just want to start out by saying that I was fully prepared to love this game.

Now that I've finished it, I can't say I got what I was hoping for. As with the first, a well-developed storyline and stunning graphics make this game a standout, but adventure gamers usually want a lot more than just pretty places and interesting stories.

Puzzle play was thought provoking, and well integrated, but not by any means challenging. There's really not much more to say about the puzzles - which should, in my opinion, really be a big part of a game.

Voice acting, again, was lacking. It's not that they read the lines badly, and the dialogue was well scripted, but... there was just a certain lack of emotion in the acting. Along with this, the "gestures" that were assigned to various characters in the game were usually just absurd, and far too exaggerated. Also, the game's logic for carrying on conversations doesn't seem to be too well thought out; when you go through your dialogue notebook, locically you would go through all the choices available at that point. Unfortunately, the way it was designed just gives you the impression of hearing scripted lines, and not a natural conversation - there's a lot of repetition, and not a lot of correlation between the characters' reactions. I think the dialogue is probably the weakest point of this game.

I am not sorry that I bought the game, but I am disappointed. Even the ending, which I was really looking forward to, left a lot to be desired - and not in the same "But what happens next?" way that Syberia I did. If you bought and played the first game, then I definitely recommend this one, just to finish out the story. But it could have been much better.

More of the same

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: June 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The sequel to Syberia suffers from all of the same flaws that I pointed out in my review of the original game. The views are still picturesque, the rest of it is still a little sub-par. I think the quality of the writing went down a notch, actually. Quite a few details just didn't make sense.

For example, her boss hires an investigator to track her down and bring her home. Why? She's already talked to him and said that she's fine but she's staying where she is. What's he so obsessed with finding her for? Find a replacement and write her off the payroll! If her family wants her they can hire their own investigator.

So the numerous cut scenes where her boss is trying desperately to locate her left me scratching my head. There are a few other situations where people just don't act quite as you'd expect as well.

My biggest problem with the story was that the ending didn't really resolve anything. I had assumed that when Kate got to Syberia she'd find out what happened to the Yukols and maybe shed some light onto Hans' lifelong obsession. But nothing of the sort happened. It was kind of disappointing.

*MINOR SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT*

More Gripes: When Hans is at Death's Door, he asks for Oscar to "open his heart" to him. Apparently that meant that Oscar dies and becomes... some sort of weird body armor for Hans. Apparently, that helped bring him back from death's grip so that he could continue on.

What?? Did Oscar have some sort of magical healing powers I wasn't aware of? Apparently Hans had planned all along for this to happen... how did that kind of planning come about?? You can puzzle over this for hours and not make sense of it.

Kate's very sad at the event, I've read other reviews that have called it a tearjerker. But for me the characters were so flat and uninspired that I really didn't feel that much for them. Although I will say that Oscar was one of the more interesting ones.

Then a guy gets pecked to death by penguins - the game does have it's humor!

In the end you get to Syberia and manage to figure out how to call the Mammoths. Hans climbs up one and rides off into the sunset. That's it, the big ending. He rides a Mammoth. Now he can die happy I guess. He could have had almost the exact same experience by travelling to India and riding an Elephant... but for some reason it had to be a Mammoth. We never find out why.

But he's happy now, I assume he'll find a quiet place to die. The island itself seems deserted - did the Youkols there die out, or are they just on another part of the island? What's Kate going to do now? Isn't she effectively stranded?

With so many loose ends, the conclusion just wasn't very satisfying.

More of the same

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: May 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Let me just say that if you loved the first Syberia, you'll probably like the sequel as well. It continues the storyline, the puzzles are the same kind, and the scenes are absolutely gorgeous.
That said, if I never again have to sit and walk "Kate Walker" back and forth to 3 different people through 8 gazillion scenes to ask exactly the right question in the right order, I won't be very sorry. If they only had some option to quickly get you from one place to another, I wouldn't mind as much, but it takes forever to make Kate trot around from one scene to the next. Then again, the game would be really short without all that running around. I agree with the previous reviewer that this could be combined with the first game- it would be a much better value that way. There were also some inconsistancies that bothered me ***SPOILER WARNING*** why is Kate's boss SO concerned to get her back- she's on the phone with her mother, so her family knows what she's doing. Why was that whole subplot there? Nothing ever happened with it. Why does Kate's cell phone work on a Youkol ark? Why are there giant penguins in the arctic circle? Why is there a primeval fern forest lost in the arctic if the mammoths moved further north to keep cool? And finally, if Hans' health is so awful that his automaton friend had to give his life to save him, why is Kate letting him ride off on a mammoth who presumably is not feeding him, sheltering him, or taking care of his illnes? And what is Kate going to do stranded on a lost primeval island with her youki stuck in a cage? Is that Syberia 3? Kate may just have to stay there.

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