Blade Runner

The Good
Of all the games I've played in my life, Blade Runner is one of the best. It has been a few years since I played it, but I remember watching the movie (again) afterwards. During the movie, as good as it was, I felt there was something missing. The "missing" pieces were things I had done in the game!

If you are familiar with the story, you know that McCoy's main mission is to determine who is a human and who is a replicated-human, or "Replicant". With each new game, the engine determines which of the characters are humans and which are replicants - even you. Some of those can change as you make decisions during gameplay - others will remain constant. This makes for a game that is changeable with every new start. I have been told that there are 13 different versions of the story in all and 4 or 5 possible endings. I, myself, played it three times and found different things each time. I loved the fact that it was replayable.

Gameplay is full of futuristic, detective-type investigation. You'll be searching crime scenes, analyzing data, taking photographs and analyzing them, uploading and downloading data from a mainframe computer as well as questioning suspects and witnesses. There are some shooting scenes that depend upon timing and aim. The difficulty of those scenes depends upon whether you set your game to Easy, Medium or Hard when you started.

While talking to people, McCoy's attitude will affect what questions can be asked as well as how they will answer. I mostly played the game using McCoy's nicer "attitude" but changing that can help or hinder you - possibly even get you killed!

Overall, the interface had almost no learning curve. I liked the handy Travel Map for jumping between known or visited locations.

The Bad
Objects can be a little hard to find in the scenes, but you learn fairly quickly to search very carefully to find everything.

I don't particularly like "timed" segments in games, but those in Blade Runner were necessary and I understood the reasoning behind them.

The Bottom Line
I consider Blade Runner to be one of "the greats". Others have said that the game was too short. I disagree. I thought the length was perfect, especially since you can play it multiple times. Playing it a second time was even more fun than the first, believe me! Don't pass up this title. It is a worthy addition to any game library.