80 Days PC Review San Jose CA

provided by: 

80 Days is, as you may have guessed, a game about going around the world in 80 days. Of course these days, that's a pretty easy feat to accomplish, providing you don't get caught up in some hostage situation. So naturally, the game isn't based in the present, it's based in 1899 - an era dominated by stylish top hats, funky facial hair, racist locals and, as it would seem, futuristic traveling devices that conquer city transport brilliantly, but apparently don't translate into super-speed global travel. Oh well, 80 days it is then. Sync futuristic mechanical steam wrist watches.....nnnnnow!

As the gamer, you control Oliver, a young adventure savvy lad who just wants to get back to San Francisco to meet up with his, er, buddies. However, his Uncle Mathew, an aged English man who is in a spot of trouble, has other plans. Good ol' Uncle Mat has made a bet, involving most of his fortune, that a man can travel around the world in 80 days, and in the process, Uncle Mat has tasked you with finding proof of four of his inventions, conveniently located in four fairly distant cities around the world. Along the way, much of the storyline and its origins are revealed, but whether or not 80 Days lasts more than 80 minutes on your hard drive is another matter.

In a way, 80 Days is a bit like a combination of "Tomb Raider" and "The Broken Sword". Most of the game is based around puzzle solving and adventure, kinda like The Broken Sword (And a bit of Tomb Raider for that matter), but rather than your traditional adventure title, 80 Days is played out in a 3D engine in a third person perspective, and it offers you full control over movement in the 3D world, similar to Tomb Raider. The only significant difference is this is not an action game - you aren't shooting or stabbing anyone - it is purely an adventure and puzzle game. Although, you will be tasked with keeping Oliver well rested, so there is a small aspect of micromanagement here too.

A lot of the game's storyline is played out in dialog between characters, which are voice acted. While the voice acting is neither bad nor terrific, the delivery of the audio recordings is incredibly buggy. We often found it hard to understand what was going on without reading the subtitles, as the audio would skip, start half way between a sentence and even sometimes remain silent. For a game based so heavily on storyline and character interaction, how this made it past Q&A is simply astounding. It offers a terrible first impression to the game, since this issue first comes up in the very first introduction sequence when you are talking to your uncle - obviously because such sequences are performed in the game's engine, and are not pre-rendered.