User Reviews (1 - 11 of 15)

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Visually Stunning but Lacking Adventure

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Let me just start off with a positive by saying, the graphics in this game are quite a sight to see. The scenes and environment are beautifully constructed.

The most important quality of this game, however, is missing: Adventure. The story is actually quite dull and the main character is neither heroic nor compelling in any manner. The few puzzles that exist are not challenging, interesting or exciting but they take a long time to complete (and it seems like it takes longer than it actually does because they are so boring). I did play this game the whole way through but only because I have always had to start what I finish. The ending was a dissapointment and really wasn't an ending at all; it was a middle and a prompt for you to buy the second game. No thank you; I will not put myself through the dissapointment again.

I would suggest borrowing or renting this game if you have a lot of free time and have no other adventures to go on. Although I did not enjoy this game in the least bit, it is always good to find out for yourself what you do or do not like.

Awful console port of a decent adventure game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

There aren't too many developers who can botch the very basics of walking down a wide cobblestone street. Somehow the dolts at Microids managed. Buried somewhere in all the invisible path blockages, incongruent camera angles, and asinine random button press "puzzles" may be a good game. And you may be better off playing it on the PC.

I really wanted to like Syberia on the Xbox. For one thing, it looks fantastic on a large HDTV that can accept 720p. While they made a weird decision to letterbox the picture AFTER cropping it 4x3, it still looks great in high-res on a big tube. The environments, which are mostly non-interactive static backgrounds, look beautiful. And the sound effects and character voices sparkle. You can draw every conversation out to a short story if desired, or cut it off and get on with the mission. The story path in relation to conversation is nearly flawless; I don't remember a single bad lead from another character.

Physical interaction with the environment, though, is torture. Pathways are blocked off independantly of visible objects. A footpath may die at a brick wall, or ten feet short of it. The only indication of an environmental limit is the sudden unresponsiveness of main character Kate. On more than one occasion this resulted in the inexcusable "stuck" phenomenon. Throw in the tendency of Kate to twirl in an opposite direction during camera seams, or the M C Escher-ish tendency of adjacent environments to not synch up spatially, and it often seems as if tiny goblins have hijacked your controller.

The puzzles range from logical spatial reasoning or process-of-elimination types, to utterly senseless tasks of random object placement. The more difficult puzzles illustrate not the developer's cleverness but rather their total lack of understanding of mechanical principles. For example, the solution to one problem of a darkened hallway is to place a spark plug, yes an automotive SPARK PLUG, in a spinning contraption that somehow creates electrical power to a supply line. Seeing it is still not believing it. This is particularly glaring in a game that features ornate mechanical workings (the "automatons" of the Voralberg family) as a primary theme. And don't get me started on the musical drink mixer. It infuriates me to think that the designer of that little jewel probably considered himself very ingenious due to all the gamers he would stump. Jackass.

Based on this review, it may seem that Syberia is unplayable on the Xbox. No, it's actually still very amusing with a healthy dose of patience and an online FAQ nearby to help navigate the inevitable stuck points. It's just preferably played on the PC.

Excellent!!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 25, 2008
Author: Amazon User

i enjoyed Syberia II as much as i did Syberia!!!! This game is action packed!!!!

Awful!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 18
Date: December 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is boring. You just walk around with no action and do corny puzzles like finding a key just to make a bell ring and in real life you could just ring it normally or yell.

GREAT ADVENTURE IS BACK

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: November 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The game is great! It is nice to see new high quality adventure games back... there will be SYBERIA II next year.. so you should play this gamebefore it comes out, because the second game will begin where the first one just ended... (like Lord of The Rings.. hehe).

Not a Page Turner

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 9
Date: September 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I read the reviews about this game and expected an experience similar to the Myst series. The graphics are beautiful throughout this game and the voice acting is as good as it can be with the material provided; however, it falls short in too many other areas for it to be called "fun." The storyline is somewhat intriquing, but definitely not a page turner. The characters are lifeless and uninteresting. Even the main character, Kate Walker, is a bore. The "puzzles" throughout the game are mindless and, for the most part, lack logic. You might be better off reading a good mystery novel.

Don't believe the HDTV propaganda

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: November 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If you run Syberia at 1080i or 720p the game shrinks instead of increasing in detail. I can't believe this isn't called out in other reviews, but I'm pretty sure I'm doing nothing wrong here- I have a very standard setup. I have the XBox High definition AV pack and changed the XBox settings to turn on 720p and 1080i. Even after monkeying around with various options on my HDTV TV the only result I could get was a tiny game screen in the middle and a big black area all around the edge. I personally feel really gipped and wouldn't have bought the game had I known. The only way the game is playable is at 480p, and at that resolution it's very hard to read the text in notes and such.

My second complaint is that the game is of the annoying throwback variety where you aren't playing 1st or 3rd person, instead you're guiding a person around a flat drawing, like in phantasmagoria. Personally I find that to be lame, as you can't walk up to something and inspect it (and at 480p, that's extremely crippling). I was hoping for 11th hour except in high definition and with a first or third person viewpoint- what I got was a low resolution throwback.

Summary: The PC version is decent even if it feels like it was written in 1995, but avoid the console versions at all costs. They just don't work on a TV screen, and HDTV is there in name only.

Very disappointing

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I thought this game was slow and boring. The controls were ackward and movement was difficult. The scenery was detailed, but I spent more time looking around than actually doing anything. I can't really say what was specifically lacking. I thought it was uninteresting, hard to manuver through, and rather dull. I played it for a few days, hoping something about it would grab me, but nothing every did.

Atrocious controls

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: June 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Maybe this isn't an issue on the PC version, but I'm just about ready to stop playing this game on the Xbox because the controls are so annoying. I don't enjoy pacing back and forth across the floor (when I can even get the character to stop standing in place while I wiggle the joystick) trying to find the one spot on the floor in the left half of the big open room that will switch the view over to the right half of the big open room. Try to walk down the road in the initial town by staying on the sidewalk and you'll get nowhere -- if you don't walk exactly in the middle of the street you'll get stuck in one place. And make sure you release the joystick whenever you walk from one place to another, since chances are the camera angle will change and you'll end up turning around and going back where you came from before you realize it. This is a very pretty game, and the story seems like it might be interesting, but it's like reading an engrossing novel that's been translated into Pig Latin. Not worth the pain.

Great Adventure with Lots of Twists and Turns

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: August 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

In starting to play this game, I was immediately struck by two things: the incredibly detailed graphics and the beautifully haunting music. Those two elements do a lot to set the stage and tone for what turns out to be an exciting -- though at times frustratingly slow-paced -- journey.

My husband and I played it together, and found that we each contributed ideas that led to the solution of the various puzzles. Although we were tempted to cheat and search the web for some clues, we didn't, and were always able to figure it out. We found the puzzles to be clever, original and well thought out. Naturally, they don't reflect what we would do "in real life;" it's a fantasy game!

There were many times when our progress seemed to hit a brick wall and we were ready to give up completely. Naturally, we had a breakthrough five minutes later and stayed up until 2 a.m. playing. (We don't have any kids for whom we must set an example.)

A bit of advice for Xbox players: Save after each big breakthrough. We hit 2 dead spots where we couldn't move and had to start from the previous save. Arrgh.

There are no blood and guts, nobody gets decapitated, and nobody gets run down by armored vehicles. It's an intellectual game, not a shoot-em-up game, and for someone who's used to faster-paced games, this might be too slow to be satisfying. We, however, loved it.

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