Chewy - Escape from F5

It wasn't easy to get hold of an English version of this game, but thanks to one of my friends I finally managed to get one. I saw a demo of the German version some years ago which seemed pretty promising so I was anxious to get started on this game.

Story

Chewy and his partner -- Clint break into the Borkian high security zone F5. The goal of the suicide mission: to steal the powerful Red Glum before the Borks could use its power for their sinister purposes. Clint manages to take the glum and even escapes the pursuing Borkian ships but his cruiser gets pulled in by a wormhole and crashes on a strange planet called Earth. Unfortunately, Chewy doesn't get off that easy...

Opinion

As you can see on the screenshots, the graphics are pretty nice. The artists didn't bring too much detail into the pictures, but the cartoon-style graphics don't really require too much detail anyway. There are lots of locations so you won't get tired of the same background all the time, I can promise you that.

The music is digitized, but surprisingly, I wouldn't say it's too good. Usually when a game has digitized music, it's because the designers wanted to make sure that the players hear their music in the best quality possible and not depend on what kind of sound card they have (that's the biggest problem with MIDI music). However, this doesn't appear to be the case this time.

I don't want to talk about the controls, they're very simple and easy to master. What I do want to talk about is the programming and the game design. There are some annoying little "bugs" (I don't know if I can even call them that) in Chewy which I could really have done without.

The game usually (in 99% of the cases) doesn't recognize if you've talked to a character previously, so when you go back to talk to somebody to see if you have a new topic you could talk about, most of the times you end up listening to the same conversation you heard when you've first talked to that character. This can be very annoying, especially since there are some parts in a conversation which you can't skip.

Another annoying "feature" of Chewy is that you can't have subtitling and speech at the same time. Don't ask me why, because the game uses close captioning when you turn off the speech but you just can't have both.

I don't want to list every single problem I had with this game (voice mismatch, some illogical puzzles, very flat jokes, etc.) I just wanted to explain why I say that the design (and some of the programming) seems a bit amateurish to me. Lots of little glitches like that (which you wouldn't even notice separately) made Chewy a bit less enjoyable than I'd hoped, but all in all I was still pleased with it. It was cute, mostly funny and just long enough not to get boring.