At first glance, Heart Of China looks incredible. Look closer and you’ll find amazing graphics and an interactive computer movie polished until it shines. Search deeper still and there’s not much left to find, because however groundbreaking Heart Of China is, it’s not a particularly good game. Basically the interaction boils down to three choices in most situations, with progress or lack of it depending on your response. The upshot is that the player has to sit through lengthy conversations, most of which is entirely superfluous (although quite amusing), twiddling thumbs and gazing at the graphics whilst waiting for the next decision. Don’t get me wrong, Heart Of China is a stunning, bold product with graphics occasionally unsurpassed. Trouble is it’s just not enough, and for your money you want something a bit more than a graphical tour-de-force which doesn’t have enough at its heart to merit repeated play and turn it into a classic.
Thoughts by Mr Creosote (22 Aug 2004) – Amiga (OCS)
Loud-mouthed American Jake “Lucky” Masters who served in the first World War owes the businessman Lomax lots of money. Quite conveniently, Lomax' daughter who works as a nurse to help the poor rural population of China, has just been kidnapped by some local warlord. Jake seems to be the right man to come to the rescue.
Not without help, though. In Hong Kong, he gets into contact with the well-known ninja Chi and the two start out towards the bad guy’s fortress. Little do they know that their adventure will take them halfway around the world…
Heart of China is a point & click adventure game in first-person style. You’re clicking around on the screen to control Jake’s (and later Chi’s and Kate Lomax') actions. Hovering the cursor over a person will usually result in it turning into a speech bubble, some smaller items can be picked up and in some directions lie exits. On the whole, this control system works quite well as soon as you got used to it (which is necessary since some inventory manipulations aren’t done in overly logical ways).
Graphics are excellent. The character faces have been inspired by/traced from well-known actors and integrated in hand-drawn backgrounds. Dynamix have succeeded in combining these two styles seamlessly.
The puzzles are unfortunately not up to that standard. Most of the time, the player stumbles around trial and error style. Especially during conversations with other characters, one wrong word is fatal and will make the game unsolvable – sometimes even without letting you know that you’ve encountered a dead end. Same goes for the other puzzles: use the wrong object, open the wrong door, do the right things in wrong order, and you’ll be dead.
The light-hearted Indiana Jones like story (how convenient that almost nobody watched High Road to China ) balances some of this out again. There are quite a few small plot branches which result in slightly different situations and puzzles and also different endings. Makes the whole thing definitely more interesting.
Also, good old Indy (er… I mean Jake) wouldn’t be himself without some action. At one point, the player is supposed to drive a tank and later, Jake is fencing with a baddie on top of a train. One of these scenes isn’t even that bad, but adventure game purists can skip them both completely – nice move.
In spite of its gameplay-related shortcomings, Heart of China can be fun for genre fans. It just doesn’t last very long, because once you’ve figured the correct route through the game out, it can easily be solved within a day.
trial and error:
success is a matter of failing in the same place at least once. To pass, you need knowledge of previous lives. ↩︎
