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Blade Runner is probably one of the few movie licenses that can topple the Star Wars/Star Trek hegemony in the gaming arena. Does Westwood successfully take the elements of the film and create a unique interactive experience?
The year is 2019 in the city of Los Angeles. The player steps into the shoes of Ray McCoy, rookie Blade Runner, just as he is assigned his first major case- an animal murder. Since most real animals are long extinct, there's only one type of suspect who could ever commit such an act- a replicant. Engineered by the Tyrell Corporation, replicants are synthetic humans created for off-world slave labor and are illegal on Earth. For the best summary of the story in Blade Runner, head down to your local video store and rent the movie.
The Atmosphere
The story is introduced using impressive full screen 16-bit color cinematics
with minimal pixellization. All of the characters and sets in the game have
been rendered in 3D and animated using video motion capture technology. It is
definitely an advance in CGI actors (remember Star Trek the Next Generation:
A Final Unity ?), but their effectiveness depends upon personal taste. I thought
the characters were creepy as they floated and bobbed while waving their oddly
disproportionate forearms and hands.
Ray McCoy, Voxel Character.
The artists need some help with elbows...
The voice acting ranges from good to poor. I didn't think the voices and script
matched the Blade Runner atmosphere very well, but they sufficed. The "real"
actors from the film actually provide the worst vocal performances in the game,
apparently unable to act without being physically involved. The ambient sounds,
like rain and steam, are tinny and don't envelop the player very well- even
SRS couldn't help. The Vangelis soundtrack was barely used, and was sorely missed.
They could have done a better job in this department.
The in-game graphics are a mixed bag- the backdrops are truly stunning 3D rendered scenes, with atmospheric effects like rain, fog, and colored lights. The characters, however, stand out like blocky sprites from an old Sierra game. They are fully rendered in 3D, using voxel (volume pixel) technology that allows them to be smoothly animated at any angle. It's too bad that they couldn't integrate them into the scenes very well.
A great looking cinematic shot.
An in-game shot of the sushi bar.
The Gameplay... or lack thereof?
Unfortunately, eye candy does not make the game. The beautiful backgrounds are
filled to the brim with detail, yet you cannot interact with them at any level.
Ultimately, the game degrades into a hunt-the-pixel adventure- you walk into
a crime scene, and then you sweep your cursor over the screen waiting for a
signal. Objects that you find are added to your clue database, but it is not
an inventory. You cannot examine or manipulate the items in any way, further
limiting the interactivity of the game.
Crime scene. Start waving the cursor... (BTW, that pink blob is the body)
Another pretty cinematic shot. The Tyrell Building, just like in the movie.
A strange option in the game is the ability to choose the "attitude"
of Ray when he automatically talks to characters or to make conversation decisions
yourself. However, the conversation decisions you make are not based upon attitude
(like Tex Murphy games), but upon topic. Most of the time you end up choosing
every single topic, making conversation a typical click-until-he-repeats chore.
Occasionally, a conversation choice will alter the course of the game. Deciding whom you shoot also determines the plot. The game boasts that randomized elements make the game playable many times. When I played the game the first time, I chose a "sympathetic" route in which I didn't kill the replicants and was able to reach two different endings by restoring back to an obvious decision point near the end. The second time I (grudgingly) played the game, I chose the straight and narrow path where I hunted the replicants mercilessly. However, the transitory cinematics did not change, nor did most of the major events- most of the differences were in dialogue. When I played the second time, I knew exactly where and what I needed to do to get to the next decision point. The short ending cinematics do not justify spending the time to play this game repeatedly.
Blame it on the hype
"The First Real-time 3D Adventure" is a phrase stamped over everything
in and on the box of this game. However, everything I have described implies
the contrary to this. The major events are strictly linear and are organized
into a total of five acts. Often I found myself wandering around doing nothing,
just because I didn't notice that a new arrow had appeared in an old location,
indicating another screen. There is no sense of the passage of time in the game
since the city is forever bathed in twilight (heavy smog, I guess) and there
are no other indications of time (unlike the clock in The Last Express).
Shooting range. Practice- you'll need it to fight the sewer rats...
A shootout. A confrontation. And no, I can't see it either.
The closest thing to a "real-time" event that I noticed was when a
character appeared that I didn't see the first time I played the game. However,
I was not allowed to interact with the character, just allowed to observe the
fact that s/he was there. In another situation, you are being hunted and randomly
a policeman will appear and start shooting you. The oldest trick in adventure
gaming solved that problem- walk out and re-enter the screen! If you get killed,
the restore screen pops up without any conclusion, further supporting the LucasArts
no-death adventure game policy. None of these events justify calling Blade Runner
a real-time game.
Go see the movie...
The result is a boring and frustrating gameplay formula that lacks puzzle solving
and interactivity: go to scene, find clues, look for a new location to become
available, repeat process. This game wastes the movie license and definitely
does not live up to the hype. The graphics are truly impressive, but I can watch
the movie and enjoy the visuals in the film. You could do worse than buying
Blade Runner, but that's not saying much in the adventure game genre.
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