Developer: Pendulo Studios
Publisher: Ascaron / Focus
Genre: Adventure
Date posted: 4 January 2007
ScreenShots: 9
Written By: Ian
Preview based on actual Hands-On
"Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle" is the second instalment of the popular adventure series, but if you speak English as your first language, chances are you never played the first title, despite it having sold over 600,000 copies in Europe alone.
This is because the developers are Spanish, and the series' publisher, Focus, are French.
However, Runaway 2 is getting the full English makeover, and will be ready for release next month.
Here at the "Playdevil.com office", we were lucky enough to get a chance to play through one complete level of the game before release.
  
The Hawaii level looks gorgeous, with great scenery, all of which is well animated.
There are a good number of backdrops (this is, after all, a traditional adventure game in the same vein as the classic 'Monkey Island' series) and they set the scene well.
There are also plenty of nice cut-scenes, so we could easily see what was going on in the story so far, which looks to be really funny (but no spoilers here!).
The characters in particular look great; highly stylised, well animated, and presented in a kind of cell-shaded 3-D way. However, the main character looks a bit one-dimensional in comparison, less fleshed out. We hope that those animations and drawings are fixed for the final release.
  
The one real negative aspect about the presentation (which we have been promised will be fixed) is the almost total lack of sound.
The English voice acting is still being finalised, so we had to make do with subtitles. This was a bit frustrating, because you could see mouths moving, and the text came up at a speaking speed, rather than a reading speed. However, once the speech and music has been added in, in the final release, this will not be an issue, so this is nothing to worry about!
  
The gameplay is very traditional.
You just use the mouse in an old school point-and-click fashion.
What is neat is that the cursor will highlight anything of importance, making it easy to click on important items or characters once you have identified them. The puzzle-solving is intuitive and original, yet also retro; the game really reminds me of the "Monkey Island series" a lot!
However, on this level, we found the puzzle-solving aspects to be a little thin on the ground; most of the time was spent in conversation.
Whilst this could be fun at times, there were also problems present. It seemed like there was only ever one correct line to use, but there were normally at least five plausible options, many of which had branching structures, all of which had to be read out in excruciatingly long subtitles (this might have been more bearable with an option to skip and/or speech).
This meant that through trial and error it could be at least five minutes to progress at all through one line of speech. Hopefully in other levels the game will be a little easier in places; more forgiving with the conversations.
However, "Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle" still looks like it could be a hit game.
Whilst this preview version has some rough edges to it, the game shows a lot of promise, especially considering the adventure genre has been much maligned by developers for many years now.
With a few fixes and some good voice acting (fingers crossed!) Runaway 2 could be a contender for the best adventure title of 2007.
-Ian
"Stay also tuned for our Developer ScreenShot SPECIAL regarding "Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turle" where we'll show you HOW the developer started to work on this fabulous adventure title.
With FRESH, never seen before screenshots of the artists behind the game."
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