06.11.08
Review – Penny Arcade: On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Part 1
Hi all, back again to bring you my thoughts on my latest foray in game-space! This time I joined those slightly strange, but hugely funny fellows Tycho and Gabe in their new adventure.
Penny Arcarde: On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, is simply superb! My previous dips into the delights of the Xbox Live Arcade titles have come back with, as was expected, some fairly light-weight, easy to pick up, easy to put down visual treats. The fact that this first (and I’ll put good scheckles it won’t be the last) endeavor into game-space by the Penny Arcade guys was released through this channel by no means relfects it’s quality, playability or simple addictivness! This is a title which would hev been worth a full-on DVD release for sure but which I’m more than happy to spend some Live Points on.
What’s good. Well pretty much everything actually. The games 2D representation fits perfectly with the PA comic-strips and the characters are well presented and realised. This comes as no surprise of course as Tycho (Jerry Holkins) and Gabe (Mike Krahulik) played a major part in the game’s genesis, with Jerry providing the story and dialogue and Mike delivering some of the most detailed art-direction ever seen, I’ll wager. The Steam-punk versions of our game loving, giraffe admiring characters are simply excellent.
Game pace and flow is well executed and I never got bored with a particular case (they’re a detective agency) as there was always something to be worked on or towards. The progression through the learning curve was good too, steep enough that you had to make an effort to get better but not so steep that you got that “I’ll never do this” feeling.
What’s not so good. If I had to find something to point a finger at, it’d be the combat process and this really is a minor niggle point. I noticed on more than one occasion I felt like I’d lost control of the interface. There was an action in progress but I couldn’t see what it was or where it was focussed. Now this is probably more down to me not concentrating enough but at the time I was trying to defend against some particularly nasty steam driven juicing machines (you know the ones I mean) and really didn’t have the opportunity to scan over every character to find out what I’d just done. I think that’s it though.. and I’m sure that when the next episode comes out I’ll simply get better at controlling things and this too will be fine.
So. PA: OTRSPD. Get it – Xbox Windows Mac, Linux – all available.
- Silesti
