The first Tex Murphy title, Mean Streets, wasn't a great game, but it was, if nothing else, at least technically interesting. The second outing of the near future hard-boiled private dick isn't even that. While it does improve some aspects, like having a far better UI, those improvements don't lead to a much better game While the story itself is pretty decent, the game itself isn't on the same level.
Some time has passed since Mean Streets and Tex Murphy is again a down-on-his-luck PI. A case comes knocking, when Marshall Alexander, a wealthy owner of Terraform corporation gives him a job of finding his daughter Alexis, who has been kidnapped and whom the local police have been unable to find. There's also a matter of a stolen ancient relic, which Alexander would like returned to him.
After some grade-A sleuthing, the case gets a turn when Marshall Alexander is found dead. His lawyer promises Tex the reward all the same if he can now find the murderer as well as Alexis. All leads point towards Mars, so that's where Tex needs to get as well.
After arriving on Mars, Tex finds out several surprising things. The first is, that Alexander had a disavowed son who is a mutant, so the tycoon wanted to cut all ties to him. The second is the true identity of Alexander, as he was actually a scientist, who massacred a group of colonists when he started to lust after an ancient Martian artifact dubbed the Oracle Stone. The whole thing has been about the Oracle Stone. Alexis had been duped by stealing it and is now imprisoned by a mad scientist, who seeks to use it to gain more power.
Obviously, it all ends with a huge explosion, a mysterious disappearance of a new-age alien prophet and Tex even might have some luck with Alexis. All's well that ends well, eh?
This time around, there's no 3D flight simulator to move around in or additional action scenes for gaining more money. There's no pawnshop either. Most of the time, you travel all around San Fransisco, and later Mars, and talk to people. On occasion, you get a more traditional point-and-click scene, where you need to do all the basic adventure game things typical for the era: pick up things, look for tiny, pixel-sized hotspots, and maybe solve a puzzle or two. Talking to people opens up new avenues to investigate as well.
The UI has gone through a much-needed overhaul. Instead of clunkily moving around with the cursor keys, the game is now fully mouse-driven. You can still move around with cursor keys, but most of the time, that's not necessary. There are a couple of times where using keys to move is advisable and Tex can at times get stuck in the environment thanks to bad pathfinding, but it's overall a huge improvement over the first game.
Overall, the adventure game side of Martian Memorandum is rather bland and boring. The puzzles aren't especially good and there's quite a bit of hotspot hunting. Some puzzles can be solved only by trial and error and some require good old moonlogic. Thankfully, there's a "help" option for each screen, so you can check it to see what hard-to-miss things there are on the screens. You still need to hunt down those pixel-sized spots, but at least the game has the decency of telling you there's something you've missed. It might not help if you've missed an item on the previous screen, but it's something at least.
The dialogue puzzles are a bit annoying as well. From time to time, you need to talk to people in a specific way to be able to proceed. If you fail, you can always come back, but it can take several tries before you find the right path, so you need to go through the same conversations over and over again. As a side note, there's some actual voice acting in the game as well. Not all the discussions, even with the voice-acted characters, are fully voiced, but the Martian memorandum is keeping up with what Mean Streets did before it as well.
The final point of annoyance I had was the navigation menu. For some reason, the devs decided to keep all the traveling points in the menu. Even after you get to Mars, you need to find the Mars locations from a list filled with San Fransico locations as well. You can't return to Earth after getting to Mars so that just makes the list unnecessarily cluttered.
All that said, the story is pretty solid and for that alone, I'd say Martian Memorandum is worth at least one playthrough. Or at least check out a playthrough from YouTube. The next game in the series is, where the adventure of Tex Murphy starts to get actually good. And if you decide to give Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum a skip, you won't be missing anything, as Under a Killing Moon is a kind of a soft reboot altogether. Besides, the story of the first game is re-told in a better fashion in Overseer, but more of that later.
For those wanting to give Martian Memorandum a go, it's available through GOG and Steam. The GOG version is bundled with Mean Streets, so that's better value for the buck if you ask me.
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