The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series has been a bit of a quality roller coaster at times. The earlier games were shoddy and stiff things, with terrible voice acting and ridiculous puzzles. As the series went on, the games got better in certain areas, worse in others and generally were just a bit inconsistent.
I have played a number of these games, although I admit that they’ve been random titles in the series, so my perspective on this game as a part of the series is a bit warped. Because of that fact, I plan on reviewing the game just as it comes, at least for the most part.
The game follows Sherlock Holmes and Watson on 6 new cases, each sharing a common plot thread that ties the entire thing together. The story does, however, seem to follow on from the previous title, which can be a little confusing at times; fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), the game has some clumsily written expositional dialogue thrown in to help newcomers out.
The common thread amongst the cases (SPOILERS) involves Sherlock Holmes’ daughter, who is actually the daughter of an enemy from the previous game who Sherlock feels responsible for because he killed her real father. This means that a constant string of conflict between Sherlock and several other people is that he needs to tell the girl that he isn’t her father and instead killed her father under strained circumstances. Honestly, this story is a little bland, and although it is interesting to speculate on how things will resolve themselves, it is pretty clear that this attempt to tie the cases together would have been better served as the main focus of an entire game instead of the glue between unrelated sequences.
The mechanics of this case vary wildly from the previous titles in the series, seeming to have a much tighter focus on the action elements of Sherlock Holmes’ cases. In the first case alone I found myself sneaking through London and across rooftops to tail a suspect, running through a forest to avoid a crazed gunman and breaking into a man’s house to rifle through his treasured belongings.
At first these scenes are quite interesting and feel like they add a great amount of tension to the proceedings, but as time goes on you eventually figure out that most of these mechanics are never again seen once they have been used. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as they could at the most be considered mini-games, the issue is that these sections sometimes have incredibly difficult to understand controls or elements that can make them very frustrating to get through, and once you’ve gone to the trouble of figuring out what it is that you’re supposed to be doing, the section ends and you never have to do it again. It does tend to devalue the time you spent learning how to play the game somewhat.
One of the more interesting features is the fact that you are expected to actually dress Sherlock this time, and not just for aesthetic reasons. You have access to a few different outfits, as well as wigs, hats, and accessories that you have to use to disguise yourself in specific situations. The bonus here is that in situations where you don’t need to disguise yourself, you can dress however you like, and since there’s a bath robe and top hat both on offer, I think I know how most peoples Sherlock’s will look for the majority of their playtime.
The graphics of the game are a huge improvement over the older games, at least the older ones I’ve played. Everything has had a huge leap forward; the characters now rarely look like gruesome parodies of people, the areas of London glisten in gross ways with all the dirt and viscera, and the plants and animals all seem as close to real as they would get in a game like this. Interestingly, the character of Watson seems to have been designed after the version played by Jude Law in the Guy Richie movies, but there seems to have been little to no attempt to make Sherlock look like Robert Downey Jr., possibly because people would just ask, “Why is Tony Stark in this game?”.
This all sounds very nice and dandy, but there’s still a bit of an issue to deal with here: the character animation. Even though the voice acting and character modelling have improved drastically, the animation is still as stiff and stilted as ever. Most of the characters look like uncanny valley abominations and move as if they’ve all suffered from rigor mortis for a year, which has an awful tendency to break the immersion like a kick in the nuts from an angry mule. This is more apparent during cutscenes than gameplay, as the actual running and movement animations don’t seem to be too bad. It gives that game a strange disconnect between the world you experience while playing the actual game and the world that you see while watching the cutscenes, one appearing to be a living, breathing version of old London and the other appearing to be some sort of advanced puppet theatre.
The puzzles are on the whole pretty okay, with very few insane leaps of logic or ridiculous expectations. However, there were one or two puzzles that just seemed to be a bit too much, and the main one that springs to mind for me is a puzzle where you have to decipher ancient Mayan hieroglyphs. The first part of this puzzle is fine, you simply match the symbols from a historical dictionary you found earlier in the case with the sample you’re attempting to translate and Bob’s your uncle. Once you’ve done this, you have to select one of two or three options for what the symbol can mean, the problem is that you have to be frighteningly precise, and although some of the words you can select are obvious others are down to semantics, and both the beginning and ending of the sentence are very unclear on what you’re attempting to say.
Music and sound effects are pretty good, but for the most part unmemorable. There is no particular piece of music that stands out in my mind as I think back on the game, but as I was heavily focused on the mystery solving in the game, it is likely that I wasn’t paying too much attention to the music.
When you start the game you’re given the option of two difficulty setting. The first is true detective which is a more basic mode that makes it easier to get through some of the puzzles and action sequences. The second difficulty setting is master sleuth, which is honestly the option most people should take. On the harder setting the puzzles are challenging but totally doable, and the action sequences actually feel tense instead of frighteningly easy. Really, it appears that the real game is in the harder difficulty, playing on the easy difficulty feels like half an experience, and you won’t get your money’s worth out of it.
The game does make massive improvements over the past games in the series, especially in the graphics and voice acting, but it just feels like it runs out of ideas far too quickly. As the cases go on the puzzles get a bit strained and the action sequences get worse and fewer, it’s almost as if they only had ideas worth using on the first two cases and had to try and spread them across six of them. It’s almost worth playing the game until you finish the first couple of cases then just stopping and pretending it ended there.
Developer: Frogwares
Publisher: Bigben Interactive
Platforms: Xbox One, PS4, PC
Release Date: 10th June 2016