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36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
How sad!, 11 Jan 2004
By A Customer
I was a great fan of Myst, and often felt frustrated by the fact that sequels wouldn't run under W2K, so I was greatly looking forward to Uru. What a disappointment! Graphics and sound, with the exception of the Garden Age in which designers seem to have run out of ideas, are superb. The rest is a disaster - a truly diabolical control system - lack of a coherent plot - no proper save game feature - puzzles that are either easy or so ludicrously convoluted and tiresome that they are easier to solve using trial and error.Game saves are provided by "journey cloths". If at any time you do something wrong and "die" (like fall off a path or fail to make a jump due to the hopeless control system), you are automatically taken back to your "Relto" (base), and then have to find your way back to somewhere near where you were before. In other words you have to wait for not one but two ages to reload (and they are VERY slow), then try once again to line up the same jump (say), so that after two or three failures you want to throw the whole thing out of the window. Even worse, the design is inconsistent, so that in some places you cannot "die", whereas in others, which may look more or less identical, you can. The control system might just about have passed muster 10 years ago. Today it is hopelessly outdated and unforgivably clumsy. It's very difficult to understand how any publisher concerned with quality could let this pass, especially since there is now more or less a standard for this sort of thing on the PC. It goes a long way towards ruining the game. Then there is the lack of a coherent plot - basically all you have to do is wander around, solve a few puzzles, and find all the journey cloths - which means that there is absolutely no tension or feeling of achievement. On finishing each "Age" you are sentenced - no other word seems adequate - to a spell in some cave or other while you listen to a ludicrous stream of pretentious babble of the type that our American friends seem to think is meaningful. There are even "clues" hidden in this rubbish - so that if you leave the room while it's going on, as I did for the last two Ages, you may find it difficult to know what to do next. This is purgatory. So, what a shame. A beautifully presented game, where so much care has gone into so much, completely ruined by the refusal to take sufficient pains over the more prosaic requirements of playability.
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