Lost is a series that has invoked mystery into the minds of its watchers since it very started a couple of years back. Ubisoft have grabbed that torch and believe that they can actually create an effectively fun game out of this great series.
Ubisoft seem to have done exactly what all TV-to-videogame ports have done and lost the whole feel. It happened in both the 24 game, where the clock became irrelevant if you could die enough times, and the Battlestar Galactica game, which I refused to buy after realising that the urgent survival of humanity had been replaced with shooting asteroids.
You begin the game as a guy who has, as we are quickly told through shoddy voice acting and clumsy writing, lost his memory of who he is, where he was going, and what the hell is going on. After walking through a random piece of jungle, seeing some female the character half-remembers, I bump into Kate and get to try out the conversation system, which is in fact much more of a pointless feature than one that we can have nerdy orgasms over like in Mass Effect.
While there are lots of options, none of them really lead to unlocking more and none of it affects character relationships. For example, the first conversation here with Kate, I get the options of asking her where the others are, who I am, who she is, whether or not she’s okay, and that’s just about all. Further disappointment arises during this conversation as any Lost fan will quickly realise that the show’s unwillingness to make a game resulted in the original actors being temporarily locked underground while less convincing voiceovers have been, at the last minute, launched in the developer’s face.
A Lost game could’ve potentially been a good game, but all the possibly enjoyable features are cut short or removed completely. The video game picks up on the concept of the show revolving around flashbacks, and thus you get to experience them, but they’re as simple as looking clips, in which you have to take a certain picture at a certain moment. After this, you’re allowed to roam about three feet from where you started, to click three memory-jogging items, all of which are in 10cm of where you spawned, and for doing so, you’re rewarded with a nice, fat achievement (if you’re an Xbox user). Accomplishment is paramount.
It’s after the second of these flashbacks that I decided it was best to remove the disk and put a lighter to it, as time on the island becomes frustrating and tedious. Most of the time, you’ll be expected to follow a very vague pathway to the next area, or be completely untold as to what needs to be done next.
Put simply, Lost is a tiny collection of about three minigames, between which are hours of walking and badly voiced dialogue. Admittedly, I smiled at one single moment of the game, when Charlie fell backwards onto the beach screaming “monster”, where the voice acting becomes so bad that he is given an accent from an entirely different region of England
On that note, I declare this game worthy of total destruction. A story-driven title such as Lost should keep that as the main focus, and this really doesn’t, speeding through the story missing a number of events the player would instantly recognize from the series, and in case any of you TV-to-game rewriters are reading this, leave good things alone, I really don’t want to have to waste my time writing this much about the upcoming Sex and the City game.
No comments:
Post a Comment