Niburu: Age of Secrets

Despite the picture on the box, most of the scenery takes place in Czech Republic, followed by small bits in France and Mexico. The storyline becomes apparent during the game play, and is not difficult to follow, even if you pay attention to a television program instead of this game. The play involves talking to people, finding objects by mousing over them, combining and using objects in the inventory, and solving a few puzzles.

The good parts of the game:

.The graphics are pretty good, and include rain (lots and lots of rain), a bit of snow, and realistically walking people.

. The puzzles are easy enough to solve without being a pain or a bore.

. You can't get lost anywhere, because the game will not let you either use the wrong items (match on the map to burn it up) or get lost, because you can't go too far without performing certain tasks or finding certain objects.

. You can turn this game off and go to bed without an aching to get back.

The bad parts:

. The game sometimes hangs, usually if there is another program running in the background.

. The tasks can be tedious and annoying, such as talking to a certain person, then another person, then back again, then walking away for a bit, then walking back and talking again.

. The characters have odd accents - there are several cockneys, and the bad guys sound like Sean Connery. The main character, Martin, has a deep, pleasant voice.

. If you miss a bit of dialogue, or even an entire conversation, you can't go back and play it again, unless, of course, you saved the game just before that point.

. The grammar, punctuation, and spelling in the dialogues are severly lacking.

. Every so often Martin exclaims, "I'd better get out of here quickly" as he saunters off slowly. Luckily, everyone else is even slower so he easily gets away.

Martin Holan is a young archaeologist working at a rather boring research project when his uncle, also an archaeologist, calls to tell him of an interesting discovery. Roadworkers in Prague have unearthed a WWII-era bunker. Its contents have interesting implications for uncle's lifelong work. Will Martin go check it out?

NiBiRu is a lovely point and click game from the people who brought us Black Mirror and it shares many of that game's strong points while having overcome some of the glitches. The sound and graphics are beautiful, of course. The voice acting is quite good. The many characters have a variety of accents --appropriate, as Martin is the only American in the game-- and they are all quite understandable and realistic. Incidental music only appears from time to time, but is low-key and interesting enough not to be annoying. And other F/X, such as storms, traffic sounds and the like, give fullness to the gaming experience. Pre-rendered locations are nicely detailed, although there is less animation than in Black Mirror. Characters are believable, rather than super-real. Movement is somewhat limited, but what there is works.

Puzzle-wise, NiBiRu is extremely easy. Most of the puzzles are inventory-type, with only about half a dozen discrete mechanical puzzles thrown in. Of the latter, only one was at all difficult, and that one was VERY difficult; I worked at it for probably six hours over the course of three days before giving up and consulting a walkthrough for the answer. There was one other sticky place with an unlikely solution that you pretty much had to stumble on by chance, as Martin gave no clue what he was thinking. There were a couple very easy timed puzzles (I got through them without a problem on the first try) and one place you could die (I only found one, anyway). However, at that point if you died, the game automatically reloaded right at the beginning of the sequence, without playing any annoying "consequences of failure" sequence. So you could try over and over again without too much frustration.

There are a couple things to keep in mind while playing this game. First, as in Black Mirror, you have to right-click as well as left click on every hotspot, as well as every item in your inventory, as this might reveal more information. Some people have a very hard time keeping track of this; it didn't bother me. On extremely rare occasions, you can't pick up inventory until you know what you need it for (or at least have visited the location where you need it). On the other hand, there are several tasks you CAN do without the faintest idea why you're doing them, before you have all the necessary parts. This can lead to a lot of wandering around and head-scratching. You can't replay or revisit dialog, but I didn't see any reason why you would have to. I liked that the dialog took care of itself; that is, once you clicked on a topic your characters just conversed about it until they were done, without your having to click on interminable conversation trees. I also liked that when a task took time--as when Martin had to wait for something--a clock simply appeared and ticked around the dial a couple times; then the game proceeded. This did away with the problem of wandering around looking for something else to do to advance the action.

The endgame showed up pretty abruptly and there wasn't much you could do but watch it unroll. I think I would have liked the possibility of a couple different endings, or more possible interaction. All in all, NiBiRu played more like a piece of interactive fiction: fairly linear, with a predetermined outcome the gamer could not influence much. After a brain-bending, puzzle-heavy game, it was a nice relaxing change of pace that took me about 15 hours, maybe less. If you like classic point and click, you'll like this one.

Boy, and I mean the title of my feelings about this game. For one thing do NOT believe the "requiriments" given to play this game. The graphics are no better than their earlier game, "Black Mirror", but you need more to play it.

Having said that, the promised story line only sort of delivered. Yes, there were Nazi plots for eternal life and all that sort of thing (Indiana Jones like), and the part in the Nazi mystery mines were different, but all in all as far as the extraterrestial, Mayan, etc., bit, they really were a tag on, and didn't deliver as the description of the game would sucker you into buying.

Certainly, if you are close to a "crazed" Adventure Gamer as I am, graphics count for a lot, and these were OK, but as I said before, they weren't much above "Black Mirror".

Moving on: The quality of enjoyment was REAL MIXED. All too many times you are required to talk to the same people at least THREE times to be able to move on. Aside from that, there was also lot of "toing and fro-ing" to the same people, and that to me was not well integrated into the story line of the game, but more just to get THROUGH with IT.

There is one truly KILLER puzzle in there - just towards the end, and unless you are a Rubic's Cube fan (I'm NOT), you like me WILL resort to a "Cheat". DO IT. Most folks on the gamer sites have admitted to this. BOY, it helps.

A final word about the graphics, "acting", etc. For some reason the same guys who put out "Dark Mirror" are really into RAIN - BIG TIME. No one seems to get wet, but it's depressing. The acting, dialogue, etc., is pathetic for the most part. The dialog REALLY needs help as to the people who were hired to read it (didn't see names on the credits, but by then I didn't care.)

The game promised a lot, took a lot in hardware and software (mine wasn't all that shabby), and delivered - only sort of.

As a final note, I've read at least 2 reviews before mine who noted the game playing like they were working under water. If you don't have the right combination of video card and OS, you will meet the same thing - or worse. I would NOT recommend buying this game, but if you want to, I'm pretty sure the used copies are out there. Buy the cheapest you can find.

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