Recent reviews by cheerie

fun, quirky humor but still a word game. nice. plenty levels, increasingly more difficult (but justified by a story)

Look the game is good, not as good as the following one (Crimes and Punishments) but still a good game. But I spent about 2 hours trying to even get it to run, nothing was working. For whatever reason the installation didn't create a correct path for the setup data, the .ini file was missing etc. Then when it finally launched it appears it comes with a terrible bug where the game crashes at certain save points - when the auto-saving icon appears, you're in trouble. If you hadn't saved in the last 45 minuts, guess what's gonna happen next - you'll be replaying them. When I had to replay a whole sequence (because autosaves are not that frequent) for the first time, I was sad. When I had to do it for the second time, I was kinda upset. Now it's the third time and although I had manually saved like 20 minutes ago, I'm still besides myself with anger. I don't want to keep replaying the same parts over and over. At the same time I don't want to be saving manually every 2 minutes "just in case something goes wrong". I want to be fully immersed in the Sherlock Holmes experience, but switching to the menu to save my game ruins the mood completely. It's truly ridiculous and ruins an otherwise nice game. If you can live with this annoying bug (which I'm not certain happens for everyone but is rather severe for me), then get the game. Although it's older, it still holds up, especially the deduction parts. The controls are sometimes annoyingly clumsy and Holmes is as slow as a snail even while running, but the cases are interesting enough.

TL;DR: I have an annoying bug that crashes my game at every auto-save point. 8/10 for game, 0/10 for absolutely annoying setup phase and crash-bug

took me about 6,5 hours to finish, like it a lot, good detective game. only the controls can be a little clumsy sometimes, doing everything with the mouse sometimes does not work so well but it can be managed. there are a couple minigames (open this puzzle box etc.) they're okay. the story is the strongest point, I wanted to finish the game in one sitting just to see who the murderer is. Not sure how it fares for Poirot lovers but I've never seen a single movie nor read a single book so I was entertained throughout. The only pity is you can't draw the wrong conclusion like in the Sherlock Holmes games from Frogware - here even if you do something that would jepardize the case, Poirot is like "ah non I would rather not do that". otherwise a solid detective adventure, despite minor annoyances because of the poilt-and-click nature of the game. Would recommend to crime lovers any time of the day, but probably only if you haven't read the book because if you know the ending, the game won't be half as good in my opinion, the game mechanics don't hold up on their own.

EDIT 30th Dec: This used to be a positive review and its original text, posted in September, follows this message. I decided to change my review because we have simply waited too long. First for a content update that never came. Then for a fix for performance issues, which came a month later and only fixed the issues for some players. The real performance fix patch and the content patch are apparently finished now but the devs don't have green light to release it to players who have already paid for the game and have been waiting for months for the game to be fixed because the marketing team said no, let's wait a bit more until CP77 buzz dies down. Unreal. The community is not any less angry now that we know this. We used be angry no updates are coming but now we know an update is finished and ready to be delivered, but we're stuck waiting because somebody wants to PROMOTE A PATCH! meanwhile the winter sale, arguably the biggest sale event of the year, is live now and if somebody was gonna buy this game, they surely have done so during this sale, with a generous discount on the price. And those people have bought a not-finished, bug-ridden game that has a patch that apparently fixes these issues ready, but which won't be released for who knows how long because marketing team said so. I'm really upset about this, this used to be one of my go-to games for relaxing after a long day, what a shame. I hope they at least add mod-support for this because this community has so many amazing ideas for this game

Original review: Tried the free sample first and played for a few hours then decided to buy the full game (for a little over 12 euros, was on sale). It's very addicting, right now I have 40 hours and expect to play for a few more. But after like 15 hours of gameplay, the only task/objective left to do is "get 500 respect with the gang" and that takes forever. I have all the safehouses already bought and I don't even have HALF the respect yet, so it's a bit grindy right now. But I definitely recommend, it's kind of a management game as well since there's day/night cycle and actual dealing is better to be left for the night so cooking is done throughout the day and so on. It's heavy on stealth but it's not too worrisome even for me, who hates stealth games, it's just the right amount of stealth. Overall, this is one of the best (subjectively, of course) simulators I've played and it's very well worth the price, at least for me, I had tons of fun

EDIT: yesterday (september 30th) was an update and there are quite significant FPS drops now. It's not unplayable, but I had to downgrade from all HIGH settings to all MEDIUM and I might have to go all the way to LOW, which is a shame, hope they fix this soon. Some other people are also reporting FPS drops, but some people are NOT experiencing this issue, just letting you know this is a possibility now. Will edit my review again if it gets resolved.
EDIT November: well look, we wanted a content update. Instead we got a graphics update that broke the game for many of us. Then we got a fix for the broken graphics update and were told that because of the fix the actual content udpate got postponed. Not so good to promise your audience something, give them something else that spoils the fun and then postpone that thing you promised again because you first have to fix that thing that nobody wanted. Get this game if you're okay with very little content that is replayable (I have 80 hours on record, but I realise not everyone will want to do the same thing for 80 hours over and over) or wait until they actually release something worthy for this game. This should have definitely been Early-Access game and none of us would have been angry. This game could have been something great but it's just mediocre in this phase

there's no story, just the puzzles but very nice little game, great graphics, relaxing music, although the 2 "game within a game" puzzles very maddening for me

some levels are quite challenging, the scoreboard is a nice touch. a fun puzzle match 3 with a twist, an interesting game mechanic and quite a nice concept. big like from me

fun and quirky, though looks like a mobile port, you'll kill a few hours with it if you don't expect too much. simple and small, but okay.

Great little game, a lot of effort must have gone into it by the developer. Thanks for hours of fun.

TL;DR: average game with below average story and dialogues, and a very frustrating mandatory launcher

Game is average at best, with average mechanics and really bad dialogues with a predictable storyline, but the Rockstar launcher or Social club app or whatever makes it even worse than average - it only works correctly like 30% of the time. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong (probably nothing, honestly) but the Rockstar launcher always says I'm NOT SIGNED IN. Which I absolutely am. The launcher takes forever to start up, forever to log into and when I complete all that labor and launch my game, it STILL says "you need to sign in to save/load your game" afterwards. As a result I must quit and restart the game MINIMUM of 2 times before everything works. So if you're not a very patient person, don't even approach this. Otherwise the game itself is quite frustrating at times - 6/10 for the game, but like 1/10 for the useless and bad launcher.

I only play solo offline against AI and it's my cuppa tea, very enjoyable