American McGee's Grimm: A Boy Learns What Fear Is

The Good
After hearing that American McGee would start a new series of games, I didn't know what to expect, considering his previous works: Alice was a pretty average action game for me, Scrapland was a pretty fun Grand Theft Auto clone and I haven't bothered with Bad Day LA after reading numerous negative reviews. But the trailers got me excited for this game and I was eager to try it out.

The game presents Grimm, a typical anti-hero in every way: he's mean, cynical and ill-mannered. At the start of the episode, the game presents the fairytale, which Grimm is about to destroy, each major scene being a level in the game. Grimm will have to change the outcome of these events, presenting an evil retelling of the story at the end of the episode.

The overall setting is great, reminded me of the Tim Burton movies. The graphics are interesting and it's fun to watch how stuff turn into their evil counterparts, such as ordinary tools into weapons, water into blood or lava, innocent animals into ferocious beasts. My favorite part was the school scene, the playground turning into a place filled with torture devices made me chuckle a few times, due to the over the top violence depicted. It really does capture the childish nightmare feeling of the different scenes.

The Bad
While the whole "run-around-and-make-things-evil" routine is fun for a while, it gets really repetitive very fast with the lack of other gameplay elements to spice up the game. Sure, it's fun to watch how everything turns dark and evil, but there's not much else to do. And the episode is really short too, I was expecting 2-3 hours of gameplay a la Sam and Max, but it can be finished easily under an hour.

Also for some reason the writing and dialogues bothered me a bit, trying to be too quirky and witty, overall feeling forced.

A weird thing would be the system requirements. While I have quite a capable rig, it seemed strange that such a small game would be such a resource hog, lagging during certain animations and towards the end of the level, when the evil things start to clutter the environment. There are a few glitches in the game, such as Grimm passing through objects, or hitting invisible barriers.

The Bottom Line
For a debut, the series doesn't promise much, but I hope the developers won't waste this setting for a series of bland games. I couldn't imagine how they could still keep interest in a game after a few episodes, which I could summarize as a 3D coloring book.