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Wasted Opportunity

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: April 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth started out as being one of the best representations of the H.P. Lovecraft world that I have ever seen in a computer game. The game started out great, being totally immersive with a great story line. But the game ultimately failed due to a sanity system that makes the world go blurry, controls not work, and the character move slowly. As the world goes uncontrollably blurry, you are expected to run, shut and lock doors, climb ladders, jump balconies all while baddies easily hack away at you.This game should come with a motion sickness warning. I can not believe that this game was actually play tested. If you must have this game, rent it.

Great concept, sloppy execution

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 14 / 20
Date: February 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First of all, I really wanted to like this game. Any game based on an H.P. Lovecraft tale must be spooky, creative and tons of fun, right? I think any educated gamer with a respectable sense of survival horror would have to ultimately say "no" after playing Call Of Cthulhu. It pains me to speak ill of this game as you can tell the developers tried their utmost to give CoC an eerie atmosphere, tense moments, challenging puzzles and fierce enemies. The only one of these aspects they succeeded on is the puzzle part as you will find it an extreme challenge to not throw your controller through the TV screen. It's not even because the puzzles are so hard, it's more to do with the fact that the puzzles are boring and after trying the same tired old "jump the chasm, pull the lever, beat the timer" nonsense, you find yourself losing interest very quickly. Which leads me to the next major annoyance. When you die, and you WILL die, the deaths tend to happen (obviously) at a time where monsters are lurking, guns are blazing and puzzles are stumping and coincidentally, most of these moments in the game come right after a cut scene. Why does this make a difference, you ask? Because you can't push a button to skip the cut scenes! There were at least five instances where I died multiple times right after a cut scene and had to sit through these four or five minute interludes EVERY SINGLE TIME. That's just sloppy development in my book and it seriously hinders the gameplay experience. My other major gripe is the "insanity" of the character (a blatant rip-off of Eternal Darkness, a game which pulled this off FAR more effectively). In Eternal Darkness, your insanity would manifest itself with lucid and horrific hallucinations and you truly didn't know what was happening. It was freaky and a rare new experience. In CoC, your "insanity" makes itself evident with the screen getting blurry and your character moving as slow as molasses. It gets so blurry at times that you literally can't see a single thing. How is this fun? Keep in mind, while you're blurry-eyed and vulnerable, this doesn't stop the enemy from attacking you so it ends up being a prolonged death where you just sit and stare at a blurry screen, not knowing what the hell is going on. Lame!
And what's with the fishmen? Were they pulled right out of Resident Evil or what? Those of you familiar with the "creatures" from R.E. will scoff at these human frogmen jumping at you and easily being mowed down with a well-aimed shotgun.
The main problem I have with CoC is that it can't decide what it wants to be. I loved the first part of the game where your survival depends on stealth and cunning, not bullets and jumping (I'm a big fan of Thief so I guess that might tell you something). When the game opens, it sets a great mood and tone that ends up dwindling into a Tomb Raider type shoot, jump and lever-pull festival that eventually turns into a jaw-breaking yawn. It really has no new concepts whatsoever. It pulls ideas directly from Thief, Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness but really bringing nothing of its own to the table. More importantly, this game really doesn't create a forboding atmosphere and couldn't be less scary by the time you get to the middle of the game. That's where its creativity should be abounding, not sagging.
Go rent Eternal Darkness and Thief instead. They're both far superior and honestly, Call Of Cthulhu (the game, not the story) wouldn't exist without them.

Mildly amusing. Highly annoying

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: December 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

While this game certainly passes the time, I for one found it to be more annoying that anything else. Puzzles are great. I like puzzles, but in MODERATION! For crying out loud, once one puzzle is finished in this game, another one starts. There are occasional gun fights and chases with the bad guys, but overall this is a puzzle game. Games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill have richly layered stories and a wide variation in the actions required by the player. This game, however, is closer to Tetris in that it focuses so much on the puzzles. All of this pales in comparison to the one feature that really makes this a C- / D+ level game. Folks, I am talking about one of the most annoying features ever in a video game: the blurry screen. Whenever your character takes damage, starts to lose him mind, or encounters a ledge (he's afraid of heights, see), the screen becomes blurry to reflect his conditions, and you will barely be able to see what's going on. The result is that you will basically be unable to control your character until the blurriness passes, which can take 10-20 seconds. In the meantime, you will flee into enemies or towards a drop-off. This frequently happens at inopportune times and will result in your death. It's so annoying that I cannot believe this feature made it out of the test phase.

In my opinion, Resident Evil and Silent Hill are far superior to this. Fortunately for me, this game was a gift, and I am selling it back as soon as possible.

Too much for the Xbox.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 8
Date: December 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Without a doubt, Dark Corners is an ambitious game. The setting is wonderful, the graphics, sound, and level design good, the HUDless system innovative.

Unfortunately, it's too ambitious for the hardware. In the early levels it's adequate, but by the end of the game Dark Corners becomes a sludgefest of stuttering sound and graphics. How does this happen on a console game? The designers had to know what resources they had available, and should have reduced the effects to make it playable.

On a fast PC - with fixes for the minor bugs - this would be a 5 star game, but the inexplicable failure to tune the game for the platform is completely unacceptable.

had potential

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: June 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I gave up on this during the chase scene when those guys were chasing you in the hotel due to slow controls, blurry screens and slow movement. Very annoying, this game should have been alot better.

Cthulha: Dark Corners of the Earth

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 28
Date: November 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I found the game rather boring. The load time was aweful you just start to get the thrill and you have to wait for load. It just got frustrating. I wanted to love it, I wanted to love it, I wanted to really but I just can't * Cry

How do you pronounce that?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: June 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I recently bought this game used, after trading in my copy of the -less-than-two-weeks-old copy of Astonishia Story for PSP (don't f***ing buy that tripe; wait for Valkyrie Profile), I picked this up. I have been intrigued by the premise for a while, but was timid due to the overwhelming number of lackluster titles currently available. Feeling like taking a chance, I decided to bite the bullet.

Overall, this game is pretty okay. It's not outstanding in any sense, but it does the trick. I'm only 21% of the way through the game, and have already picked out a couple of gripes.

First off, it's touted as a first person shooter. I'm almost a quarter of the way through a game, and have yet to find a gun or any form of melee weapon. That's not to say that there haven't been tense moments in the game, but if there's not much shooting, why call it a shooter? This title would have been much better had the developers adopted more of a third-person perspective a la Silent Hill or Resident Evil.

Second off, and the biggest gripe thus far, THE CONTROLS SUCK. Again, if it was a third-person view, it would be a metric buttload easier to judge some of the jumps you have to make. In one particular chase scene you have to hop out of windows, onto balconies, and across alleyways in order to avoid hatchet- and shotgun-wielding bloodthirsty cultists. I plummeted to my demise numerous times before I finally passed that particular chapter.

It's not all bad however. Call Of Cthulhu is definitely atmospheric enough to hold the stigma of a survival-horror game. It's dark and brooding, and the character design I have encountered thus far has only made the in-game world that much more creepy. The storyline is at least intriguing enough to keep one interested...

Overall, I'm glad I took the chance with this game. I have a ways to go, but I'm glad.

Wah!!!!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: July 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Being a huge H.P.L. fan, I was hyped beyond all compare when they announced the release of this game...ABOUT 6 YEARS AGO!

Anyway, after hearing date push-back news for years, I gave up. Then, one day at Bookman's I see it used for 19 bucks!! I think "SCORE".

I should have known that when I tried to tell the sales person the name of the game so he could take it out of the locked cabinet and while pronouncing it, I spit all over his face and he punched me in the eye, that I should leave this one alone.

Of course, I have to do eveything the hard way, I ran home with it...then wondered why I didn't drive.....oh well.

The game sticks really close to the HPL stories and has nice, super-creepy visual scenery, but it plays about like games from the early days of playstation. the whole time I played it, I wondered, "where's all the neato, high-speed things they kept talking about, like non-track, and all the interactive things that don't exist?"

Trying to get past the Innsmouth folk was a nightmare, and caused my game controller to riccochet off of every wall in the house. there was other spots that were equally hard, but i don't want to ruin the game for others.

I guess I could have just said, "okay, if your a gamer that loves HPL stories, try it out", but I drank too much coffee today, so I felt I had to ramble.

All that's going for this game is its Lovecraft roots.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I saw an ad for this game in an old issue of Game Informer. They advertised First Person action, insanity meter, and of course Cthulhu. I was thinking Doom when I read First Person, Eternal Darkness when I read insanity meter, and "Thank the gods, they finally made a H.P. Lovecraft game!" when I saw the title. All right, turns out to be 2 strikes and one ball. The first person action, well there really isn't any. You spend most of your time running away from creepy villagers, and not in the fun way like in RE4. The insanity meter is pretty bad, no mind-blowing hallucinations like in Eternal Darkness, just a bunch of pounding and blurred vision. Their concept of going insane is my idea of a DWI stop. You really can't screw up the story of Cthulhu, so that bit was all right but done very sloppy. It was as if they had to change the storyline to make the game play better, but really they ruined up the only thing they had going from the start. The details are great and I have spoken with others who absolutely adore the game. A warning to those who aren't into H.P. Lovecraft, you will most likely hate this title. Imagine playing through Silent Hill without getting your first weapon until you're in the hospital. Sounds hard right, yeah well this game is ridiculous when it comes to survival.

Slow, Steady Spiral into Insanity

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 21 / 21
Date: February 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If you're a fan of horror stories, then you know that one of the founders of this genre was HP Lovecraft and his Cthulhu stories. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Rhode Island, and his Cthulhu storyline was based in a seacoast town of Massachusetts of the 1920s. Lovecraft's own father went insane when Lovecraft was 3, and Lovecraft himself had a nervous breakdown in high school. His stories were developed from his own severe nightmares.

This game title has been in development for many years, so the graphics in the end product aren't necessarily cutting edge, especially for the XBox platform. It's important to just accept this up front. The load times are also exceedingly long. Strangely, when we played this on our XBox 360 (in backwards compatability mode of course) the loading screens were super long - but the individual messages that would cycle through would not stay on the screen long enough to read. It was an odd combination.

I found it best not to think of Call of Cthulhu as a traditional horror game like Doom or Half-Life. This game isn't about constant action and harassment. It is much more like a steady epic that unfolds over time. It's not about in-your-face blood and guts, although there is plenty of both. It is more of a psychological gnawing away at you. It's a game that you need to set aside a long weekend, a bottle of wine and turn on the answering machine for. It's immersive.

So how does it play out. You are Jack Walters, a detective called in to help with a cult that has holed up in a gothic house in Massachusetts. Strangely, you have no gun. You and a few cops approach the house, and the cultists shoot your cop pals down. You try to pick up one of the downed cop's guns and the system says "Ewwww a dead body". Hmmmm. You go in and find that the cult is obsessed with you for some reason, and find a few dead cultists. You spot a trap door in one room - and when you open the trap door, you mysteriously can't walk around the room any more - your feet are now unable to step over the tiny ledge that lines the hallway. You go down, and see .... things go dark.

Fast forward to six years later. Now you're a PI, suffering from amnesia from that horrific event. You are sent into a small town to track down a missing "lad". The town is typical New England - dark, dreary, grey, with people who speak in monosyllables. I live here, I know this type of town ;) You're now ferrying items to get clues, doing sneak-avoidance to get into areas, and solving puzzles. You don't even get a weapon for about the first third of the game.

There are interesting twists because of the "going insane" aspect of this story. If you spend too much time in a scary area, your vision goes blurry and you have other issues. You can't always trust what you see. You have to plow through trying to do the best you can, as quickly as you can.

There is a group of horror players who will probably find this game "too slow". Players who are hooked on the constant action of Halo etc. probably won't do well with the long loads and exploring sequences. On the other hand, I really recommend that they stick with this. Fast adrenaline can be a shallow thrill. A slow-building insanity can really get to you.

If I have complaints about the game, it stems from some of my commentary earlier. The game elicits laughter when obviously it wasn't meant to. It seems that 99% of the doors you encounter are mysteriously glued shut. The dialogue is repetitive and sometimes inane. You're being shot at but can't pick up a gun?

That being said, every game has its dumb idiosyncracies. The guy in Grand Theft Auto could take down hordes of drug dealers but would drown in 1" of water. You just have to accept these things as part of the game environment.

I definitely recommend this game for adventure gamers who can handle the mature rating. If you're more of a shoot-em-up, at least rent the game to see if you can get into the flow of things. You might find that you really can enjoy something that has a slower pace.

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