It’s as if having heard that point & click adventure games were dead, the designers decided to move forward a decade…and make a 3D platforming collect-a-thon.  I don’t know what Team17 was thinking.

Unfortunately, the camera is about as bad as you’ve read in other reviews, often times swinging out to dramatically different angles any time you move after positioning it yourself for an important jump.  Yeah, it even did a 180 on me.  Compounded with fall damage (!), this makes missing jumps even more annoying.  Fortunately there’s recharging health which heals rapidly.  Apparently there’s combat later in the game…

Indoors, you’ll often deal with rotating fixed camera angles.  Jumping between angles gets very disorienting when wandering room to room.  Believe me, I know how hard it is to ensure that there’s no disorientation when planning camera placement, I did it in my last job.  However, unlike my last project, the environment is in 3D, and there’s already a player controlled camera in the game.  Why not let them use it indoors as well?  Uh…actually, it’s so inconsistent that sometimes you can, though oddly, in tiny rooms where you think any potential collision issues would show up.  I dunno, maybe I’m just remembering that last part wrong, but nothing feels consistent indoors.  In one building, I even encountered a hidden room.  It wasn’t a secret location; the entryway was just blocked by a massive column smack dab in the middle of the camera view.

So far the humor is give and take, and the delivery is great for the most part.  I feel like the writing is more edgy and mean-spirited than necessary and has been in the past.  The sound mixing could use a bit of range compression.  It’s nice that the actors do sometimes mutter under their breath like real people, but its all for naught if what they’re saying can’t be heard.  Yes, I cranked up the “Voices” volume meter and enabled the subtitles.  However, the way that the subtitles appear and advance is a bit sporadic.  For the most part, you’re presented two lines at a time and it scrolls after reaching…some point…in the second line.  The timing feels off, but maybe it’s just the presentation.  It doesn’t so much as scroll as flashes to a revised text box.  For long lines of dialogue, you’re presented with the first line of text centered by itself, then the box flickers and all of  sudden there are two lines of text.  Like most everything else so far, distracting and disorienting.  It’s a necessity, though, if you want to follow what’s being said.

The art direction I don’t agree with at all.  While still caricaturized, it’s a deviation from the existing cartoony style.  I think the use of the Unreal Engine was a hindrance as the lighting model causes more damage than good.  Bump/normal maps are hyper-exaggerated, shadow gradients aren’t at all smooth, and there’s some really strange hovering speckles on some characters’ skin I just can’t figure out.  It’s kinda like if you sneezed on your monitor.  I wonder if some development was migrated from the original Xbox.  There are way too many textures that are of unfortunately low resolution, including a name plaque presented up close in the opening cinema that is impossible to read.  There are certainly some beautiful high-res textures–the billboards, for example–but that only makes for a totally inconsistent experience.

On the bright side, the indestructible and excessively wily golf carts are more fun to drive and toss around than the Warthogs in Halo.  That is, until you bounce yourself into clipping into a building and panicking that you can’t find a way to maneuver yourself out because you can’t just jump out.  Oddly, in this situation which, somehow, they planned for, Larry does have a line of dialogue that states that there’s “no exit.”  I need to put myself in a tiny Austin Powers-esque hallway and see if that’s where I’m supposed to be unable to leave the cart.

Despite the nagging technical shortcomings, I haven’t been too frustrated to turn it off and am eager to see what’s coming.