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Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis
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Graphics & Sound:
Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis, which is also known as Sherlock Holmes versus Arsene Lupin, is the fourth Holmes title to come out of Frogwares, and, quite frankly, things just keep getting better. This time, the world's most famous fictional detective goes up against the most infamous fictional burglar.
Nemesis' environments are full real-time 3D from a first person perspective. London itself is wonderfully rendered and perfectly gives off that late-1800's feel. As I progressed through the game and went to places like Buckingham Palace and London Tower, I was downright stunned at the attention to detail that went into each location or precious artwork that was fairly well replicated for this game. If nothing else, Nemesis gets props for presentation.
Dialogue is pretty dead on, which is always nice for a genre that is as talk-heavy as this one. Voice acting, while not spectacular, gets the job done, and the constant and varied assortment of classical music just hits the spot as far as laying out the game's setting. All-in-all, the auditory aspects of Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis do more than just "get the job done", but aren't great enough to write home about.
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Gameplay:
Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis has Holmes and Watson squaring off against another literary character from that era, the gentlemanly burglar, Arsene Lupin. This French villain has left a note for Holmes claiming that he will steal a precious iconic artifact from four of London's landmarks over the course of the next week. He will leave our heroes clues to which treasures will be stolen and hints about how to stop him. Can you, as Holmes, work through the riddles and puzzles in order to stop the robberies at the National Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London Tower and British Museum?
The game's story is refreshingly lengthy, making this game one of the most plot-heavy and detailed adventure titles I've seen in a while. Granted, a lot of the length is related to the complexity of the puzzles, and the drawn-out cat-and-mouse style of Nemesis, but even knowing all of the solutions (during a second play through for instance), there is still a major time investment in this game.
Gameplay style doesn't stray too far from standard adventure molds. You will go from location to location looking for items you can pick up and combine, as well as examining every inch if the rooms looking for the clues to solve Lupin's riddles. Unfortunately, this game also comes with many of the same pitfalls that adventure games succumb to.
There is a lot of backtracking in Nemesis since areas that yielded no hot-spots a previous time, might be of interest when you return since you and Holmes have learned some new tidbit of information. While this adds a bit more realism to the game, since you wouldn't necessarily know you needed to examine something until later, it adds just that much more pixel hunting, a particular problem Nemesis is bad about.
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Difficulty:
Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis has a wide variety of puzzle types, and with that comes a variety of difficulties based on your personal style and preferences. There are times when you will have to work through logic puzzles, or do basic arithmetic in order to get through the series of tasks on hand.
One of the more interesting puzzles I found were the riddles themselves that are posed by Arsene Lupin, and the questions that Holmes asks you, the player. In these cases, if you don't have all of the information on hand to type in the answer the game is looking for, you will have to do some more digging, either in the world itself, or in your logs.
While a good number of the puzzles are straightforward and easy to get through, there are plenty of times when Nemesis left me stumped and I had to put the game away for a while until my head was clear.
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Game Mechanics:
Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis' biggest flaw seems to be the excessive hot-spot hunting. While many adventure games suffer from this problem, I don't think I've seen one yet that is quite as bad as this one. Since the game is in 3D, there are plenty of hot-spots that might be visible when you first enter a room, but aren't accessible until you approach it, and really closely at that. This leads to a lot of tedious slow walking around the room, crouching near objects and careful examination just to make sure you don't miss any vital pixels. On the other hand, you might say that Holmes himself would have to be just as thorough and diligent in order to find those etchings in the brick or some other minute detail, but Nemesis isn't, as far as I know, a Sherlock Holmes simulator; it is meant to be an adventure game, and this excessive pixel-hunting just made things too tedious to deal with at times.
So, should you get Nemesis? For adventure gamers, I think so; it is generally a fun adventure title, and being able to pit your wits against one of the biggest thieves in literature has a nice lure to it. The game is lengthy, so don't expect a quick play through, though a lot of that length can be attributed to tedious examinations or walking through beautiful but pointless locations.
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-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows 2000/XP/Vista, 1.3 GHz Pentium 3 or Higher CPU, 512 MB RAM, 3 GB free HD space, DirectX 9 Compatible sound card, 128 MB DirectX 9.0c compatible video card, 4x CD-ROM |
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Test System:
Alienware Aurora m9700 Laptop, Windows XP Professional, AMD Turion 64 Mobile 2.41 GHz, 2 GB Ram, Duel NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 256MB Video Cards, DirectX 9.0c |
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