Discworld II: Mortality Bytes!

The Good
Discworld II has great graphics, with large well-animated characters and nice backgrounds. It also has one of the best intros I've seen in a computer game to date (think Monkey Island II with skeletons instead of monkeys, and Eric Idle singing "That's Death"). The in-game soundtrack is also quite good, but nothing to get worked up about...

The Bad
...especially since the dialogue is really, really tedious and annoying. The fact that Eric Idle is a great comedian doesn't mean I want to hear him reading aloud naff monologues every single time I click on something in an adventure game. The situation would still be tolerable if not for the fact that all the other actors sound like drama-class rejects from hell, with lines to match their skills. I do understand that animated adventure games these days are expected to have digitized speech, but listening to this game is sheer torture. (You might think I'm concentrating too much on just one aspect of the game, but this isn't an action game like Medievil, which has about the same level voice acting as Discworld II - there is a LOT of dialogue, and it's all bad, believe me!)

The Bottom Line
It's a Terry Pratchett novel with pretty animation, some interaction (puzzles, that is), and all the dialogue read aloud by Eric Idle and the janitor along with some of his "funniest" drinking buddies. Were this a text-only game, I imagine I would have rather enjoyed it, since the jokes and puns actually work most of the time, but the acting puts me off the game every single time I decide to give it another go. I actually can't say much about the puzzles and plot because I never could get into the game. If you're a Terry Pratchett fan, go read a book and forget this!

(Actually, if you speak "All your base are belong to us" English yourself, you might not notice how bad the acting really is...)