Simon the Sorcerer 3D

The Good
I consider this one of the worst games I ever played, the only ray of sunshine in this game was the writing. Fortunately the writers continued to write Simon with the same excellent dialogs that we saw in Simon 2. I really enjoyed Simon's cynicism. This is about the only good thing I have to say for this game.

The Bad
Where to start? I really loved the two previous games - especially Simon 2 - which to this day is my favorite quest game. Needless to say I was impatience to see the release of the sequel.

The control interface was completely changed from the classical point and click mouse control, now we control Simon via the keyboard in a very uncomfortable way and there are control bugs which cause Simon to run against the walls almost every time you try to move him.

The puzzles also changed for the worst, while the two previous games were pure quest games with inventory based puzzles, this game chose to add mini-games. Those mini-games are extremely boring and tedious and had nothing to do with the adventure game and it seem they were merely added for the sake of using the 3D environment.

The new 3D look is the major area that the game creators really screw up, the characters look extremely ugly and so is the rest of the game environment, it really looks like the game's programmers didn't know what they were doing.

Another blunder of the new 3D look was the game environment, it's simply huge and empty, so you find yourself spending a great amount of time running in empty fields or streets looking for something that Simon could interact with, this get very tedious and contribute to your feeling of boredom from this game.

The Bottom Line
Despite being a huge Simon fan I found this game simply unplayable, by level three the control bugs got worse and worse, so that a simply task like walking the streets became a chore (running into walls would cause that...) and this made me abandon the game.

I think what made this game a real disappoint is that it has the great plot and writing of the previous games, but horrible controls. If the creators would have invested more time programing a better and bug free 3D environment, or if this game was made in 2D it could have been an excellent game.