After the abysmal Simon the Sorcerer 4, I'm not quite sure if Simon the Sorcerer 5 is in any way or form an improvement from the previous games. In some ways, it almost, kind of, feels like an improvement, but when all is said and done, it still is a poorly written, poorly acted and poorly designed adventure game, which deserves to be forgotten. It just is a waste of everyone's time. It's a waste of time for the players just as it was waste of time for anyone who put in time in developing it. While it isn't as excruciatingly bad as Simon 4 was, it still isn't nothing to brag about.
Since the end of the previous game, Simon has been slumming with, his now girlfriend, Alix's place in Magic Kingdom. This leeching comes to an end when a group of green aliens rain down the sky and occupy the city. On top of that, they abduct several people, including Alix, so disgruntled Simon has to take on the hero business yet again.
The first thing to do is to escape the city, which ends up with Simon getting caught by strange mole men in trench coats. He is locked up and needs to escape again, only to find himself from a bar owned by a gay pirate (many hammer sharp jokes ensue). Other notable characters are the drunk wolf and an extreme feminist Red Riding Hood (even more hammer sharp jokes ensue). If the sexist jokes weren't embarrassing enough prior to this point, you can bet the comedy doubles down on them here.
After some twists leading to the mole kingdom and back, Simon has to get a spaceship and a crew. This he does and blasts off to space for a final confrontation with the green aliens. The crew consists of Swampling, the wolf and Red Riding Hood, all of whom are slacking of their duties, so Simon has to get his crew to do their jobs if he's ever to reach the aliens.
Some space shenanigans later, the ship crashes into the alien mother ship and Simon is captured, again. In a surprise twist, you now control the wolf, who becomes some sort of drunken Jedi and ends up using his powers in diverting the ship powers from its main weapons. The game switches to Simon again. He now learns, after getting hooked into the ship's translator, that Nihonians are not conquerors, but tourists. The wave of the chaos their arrival has caused is because of their cameras, which snap pictures and cause destruction at the same time, an aspect the aliens had not realized themselves. And so Simon the Sorcerer 5 finally, mercifully, ends.
Simon the Sorcerer 5 suffers from the same issues as its predecessor. The first, and most noticeable, is the terrible voice acting, which might be, again, the fault of the badly done translation, as the humour doesn't generally work at all. There's a constant barrage of jokes, which fall flat and often step to landmines which make many of the jokes seem sexists and even homophobic. I'm guessing the aim was to be satirical and parodic, but any such notion might have been lost in the translation with any with that might have existed. As I don't speak German, I can't verify this, so I'm just going with my gut feeling here. Comedy is terribly difficult to translate.
The puzzle work leaves a lot of room for improvement as well. It is, generally, a bit more interesting than in Simon 4, but only slightly so. There are quite a few puzzles hanging around pixel hunting and moon logic. The internal hint system does help a bit, but again, only a bit. On broader terms, Simon the Sorcerer 5 is just dreadfully boring as a game. The puzzles aren't fun and the comedy falls flat, so there's nothing really to like about it. And yet it manages to be a bit more toleratable than the previous game, so I guess that's something at least.
Structurally, Simon 5 is one big escape room puzzle. You go from one location to the next, with the main objective of escaping the section. While it can make the puzzles easier to manage, it doesn't make the game more enjoyable. That's more of the fault of the bad script and the poor voice acting though. If those worked, then the game itself would be pretty toleratable.
Graphics are, again, the best part of the game. The style has shifted towards a more hand-drawn look, which works nicely. The characters are in real-time 3D, but utilize cell-shading, which looks decent. The look is definitely better than in Simon 4 and the overall appearance is more consistent and appealing.
As with Simon 4, this one isn't sold anywhere either. The old version I bought ages ago from Gamersgate can't actually be activated anymore, as it has an online authentication system that doesn't work on grounds of the system being offline. So in order to suffer through Simon 5, I had to crack it. If you intend to hunt down a copy of the game from somewhere, you might be forced to crack it as well. I don't know if the disc version uses an online authentication, but if it does, you might have to jump through hoops that ain't worth it.
There are some hints within the game of the possible sequel. The gaming gods have smiled upon us mercifully, and no such game has ever been released to torment us. There's at least a smidgen of justice in this world after all.
Comments
Post a Comment