sadly Galleon is not so hot.
I really tried to like it. I thught the graphics (while dated) showed some amazing animation (especially the characters faces) and the environments were interesting enough to explore.
Unfortunately for every nice thing it had going for it had two bad holding it back and stamping on it. The whole nonsense with the camera pointing the character where you wanted him to go and then he figured out the way to get there was little more than a fancy animation system and an anoying over-the-shoulder fixed camera perspective in reality. Why the hell can't i look left or right without him going there? why can't i just edge forward a little? does he have to take a whole bloody step every time i touch forward?
You could see where they were coming from if you think of Galleon as being a 'true' sequal to tomb raider. That games controls now look so incredibly clunky that if galleion had come out right after tomb raider it would have felt fresh and been truely inovative. Unfortunately so many games have now done 3rd person control so much better than galleon its not even funny. The number of times i tried to move the right analogue stick to turn the camera around was silly.. it was painful.
The way the game coped with interacting with objects was also really annoying. Again, you can see the design process that led to the final system but you just really get the feeling that somebody should have sat the team down and asked if they really thought it was better than the normal way of doing things? Games should be controlled by the player not by the games animation system! They tried so hard to make everything animate fluidly with no pops or shortcuts when the character has to pick up an object or interact with something in the background that they just ended up designing themselves into a horrible corner and ended up with a system so clunky it borders on feeling like a point and click game from the early 90's.
The combat sucked - press 1 button repeatedly in a slow rythmic fashion to get super amazing combos. Great. I'm not even gonna try and explain that one - just play it, you'll see. Oh and combine it with the fact that you can't see any direction except for the one you are fighting in due to the fixed camera and it's truely horrible.
The wall climbing / ladder claimbing stuff could be great if it hadn't been for two more fatal flaws. 1 - Why do you have to press a button to climb a ladder or wall (hello? can't i jump onto a ladder? or just walk into? wheres the much vaunted "just push in the direction you want to go and he'll figure out how to get there" now eh?) and 2 - the camera when climbing (and also swimming) is the biggest pile of shit ever. it swings all over the place and turns what could have been some really fun areas of the game (where you get to scramble over the inside of caves, across gaping ravines and around lofty ledges ike some kind of olympic athlete after a fresh dose of steroids) into something so disorienting, frustrating and downright unplayable that you can't help but think it must be your own fault somehow. Seriously, fighting to keep the camera pointing at something other than the sky, or the floor, or both in rapid succession while trying to move along a simple climb wall is the hardest thing i've ever had to do in a game.
i could go on and on and on and on.. I really did try to love it! I stuck with it for hours..
oh yeah - i thought the plot was great! Unfortunately i didn't get to see how it ended due to just not being arsed to play anymore.. shame. Somebody should really have told them it was shite. It could have been so much better!
