Amerzone: The Explorer's Legacy

The Good
An old scientist and explorer implores you to travel to the Amerzone and return an item he took from there in the 1930's - the egg of an unknown species of birds. This intriguing story will take you to an imaginary land. You meet all sorts of interesting creatures and visit unusual places.

The overall interface is pretty easy to use with a simple arrow cursor directing your travel and actions. The graphics are very pleasing to the eye and nicely rendered in the 3D environment. Sound effects can be heard for the various actions you take and you can hear the whistling wind and waves crashing on a beach. All this adds to the realism. There is no real background music, so you feel you are really "there." Musical cut-scenes happen when you have solved some of the puzzles and enhance the feeling of accomplishment.

Object-oriented puzzles are well integrated into the story and I never felt they were unnecessary. They're not particularly difficult if you have paid attention and studied the written clues.

The game is contained on 4 CD-Roms, and I was pleased there was no disk swapping at all.

The Bad
A few technical bugs and glitches caused me to dump to my desktop occasionally. This usually happened when I moved too quickly through a scene. Sometimes the graphics loaded slowly and, I think, overloaded my system's resources. I learned to save more often in anticipation of these few glitches.

The Bottom Line
While enjoyable, this game does not live up to the box advertisement which defiantly states that it is "better than both Riven and Myst combined." It will appeal to players who enjoyed those games, but it does not provide nearly as many hours of play. It does have easy-to-medium difficulty puzzles, lovely graphics and music, nice sound effects and an interesting plot. A nice interlude, but not in the least equal to its mentor.