The Gene Machine

I always liked third person adventure games with hand-drawn graphics, so I was really excited about this game. I'm not saying that all of my expectations (or in deed, my basic requirements) have been met but I still had lots of fun playing The Gene Machine.

Story

On a seemingly normal and perfectly ordinary morning a talking cat unexpectedly walks into a house in central London seeking a hero. He's travelled far since his escape from a tropical island only to bring disturbing news to the British Empire. It seems that an evil scientist, Doctor Dinsey has discovered a way to combine genes from any two species, creating a mixture of the two while keeping their best features. With this technology he plans to create a mutant army, the help of which he's going to use to take over the world.

The scientist is clearly insane (otherwise why would he want the world) and must be stopped. The only man for the job is Britain's number one adventurer and secret agent: Mr. Fanshawe (spelled Featherstonehaugh, as all gentlemen know). With the help of his faithful manservant, Mossop, he'll have to try and save the world from the terrible Gene Machine.

Opinion

As you can see, the story isn't exactly the screenplay of the year (no matter what year) but the finely crafted and slightly morbid British humor does, to a certain degree, compensate us for the lack of originality.

The designers paid special attention to even the littlest of details both in regard to graphics and sounds. This includes gorgeous, hand-drawn background graphics and character animation and also the very effective use of stereo surround sound. The reason for the low sound rating is the absolutely atrocious musical score. The MIDI tracks used in the game are simply annoying and the only consolation is that we don't have to listen to them all the way throughout the game because there are blessedly few of them. The sounds and speech, on the other hand, are extremely good.

In all fairness, I have to admit that even though the background graphics and animations are truly beautiful, the character design could have been a little better. If you examine the screenshots, the characters (and objects) often stick out of the background either because of their crude, simplistic look, or because they were rendered by a computer and as such, do not fit into a hand-drawn environment.

As for the puzzles, I have to say that for the most part they are fairly easy, save for a few exceptions which, in turn, are completely impossible. Sometimes the only way of progression is the good old trial and error method but at least there is very little pixel hunting involved, which is always a plus.

All in all, I was statisfied with the game despite its lack of originality, the somewhat clumsy controls which take more than a while to get used to and the constant presence of Mossop who seemingly has no other job in the game than to irritate us by slowing down our progress (even if he is rather funny at times).

With all of that said, this game provides a nice break from the world of serious adventures and is just the thing if you're looking for ridiculous (but not necessarily funny) humor.