Review: American McGee's Grimm

4 August 2008 Tags  , , ,

grimm

Well, McGee is back to it again and this time in partnership with GameTap is offering the first episode (A Boy Learns What Fear Is) of his game series, Grimm, free.

I'll cut to the chase, its 193meg of rubbish.

Graphics

In a gaming world obsessed with realistic graphics, it's refreshing to see games that differ from the norm, be it celshaded hijinks like XIII or Team Fortress 2, or seemingly water-coloured games like what I've seen of Diablo III thus far.

Grimm certainly lacks the realism, but unfortunately also lacks and sort of quality in the graphics department. Utilising the Unreal 3 Engine of course gets it gets motion blur, but incredibly low quality textures, models and even animation reminds me of the first generation of game mods, certainly not something you'd see from a "seasoned" professional such as McGee.

Gameplay

Mario or Sonic are fine examples of platformers. You run around, you collect things, you dodge or defeat evil, and then you arrive at the end of the level. Often there will be a series of jumping puzzles that require varying degrees of skills to time and pull of the jumps perfectly, else you face doom. 3D platformers are much the same.

Well, Grimm's a platformer too, a 3D one at that. Unfortunately, there is no real evil to dodge or defeat, you simply run around somewhat slowly spreading "darkness". When you stand still, you pee. Yes, you pee. You pee and then you can jump to where your pee hits. So there goes the puzzle bit of jumping – you're given an exact guide as to where you'll land.

You also get to perform a "buttslam" by pressing the jump key twice. It spreads darkness a little further, or stuns those trying to clean up darkness.

Should you still insist on playing this game, there are six levels which shouldn't take you more than five minutes each if you want to convert everything to darkness. If you don't, maybe two or three minutes each. The entire game was over in less than the time it took to download for me (I'm on 1.5mbit ADSL)

Bugs

  • Apparently will throw a bit of a hissy fit on x64 installsTurns out this is a problem with the GameTap installer which requires a 32bit system. Works fine if you install from 'setup.exe'
  • If you've got UAC turned on, you must force it to run as Admin, otherwise you can't change game options and even worse, you can't progress anywhere in the game. You'll finish a level, and it'll restart the level.
  • Alt tabbing caused instant crashes for me.

Closing Thoughts

I don't know what the target audience is – it'd be too dark for littler kids, the dialogue is too dry/boring for 'adults', and the gameplay is too boring for everybody. Edit: American confirms (in the comments) that the game is aimed at the casual gamer.

Despite how little I think of reviews giving games a rating, I'll have to give this one a over generous 2/10. The first point is for the price – free is good, and the second is for licensing the UE3, so that Epic can stay in business long enough to inevitably make UT4, or better yet, Gears of War 3.

McGee, if you read this I'm sorry, I'm not trying to break your heart, but this game was crude not just in the idea of game, but execution of the game as well.


2 Comments