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Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper

Score: 80%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: The Adventure Company
Developer: Frogwares
Media: CD/1
Players: 1
Genre: Adventure

Graphics & Sound:

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper feels like the followup to last year's Frogwares Holmes game, Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis, except this time, the most famous detective goes up against the most famous unsolved murders.

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper has a nice presentation to it. Not only do the main character models like Holmes and Watson look pretty good, but the streets of London and its inhabitants look right as well. From the dirt-covered street dwellers to the prim and proper aristocrats, the game does give off the 19th Century London feel... at least as far as I've seen it depicted in other media.

Audio feels very mediocre. While there are an abundance of background noises that really help to add to the game's atmosphere, a lot of the dialogue and voice acting just comes through a bit phoned in at times.


Gameplay:

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper is your standard point-and-click adventure. As you run around the world, you will have to talk to a lot of people in order to get an idea of where you are going as you try to solve the string of murders plaguing London's street-walkers, and, of course, there are the required number of objects to pick up and investigate.

But Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper's biggest unique attribute is the Deduction Board. When you arrive at one of the crime scenes, you must thoroughly comb the area for any and all objects that you can pick up or interact with. Once you've accomplished that, you will be presented with a screen that lays these objects out for you. You must then arrange them on the Deduction Board to form links between them and then draw conclusions based on those links. This board also gives you access to any conversations you've had or documents you've picked up in order to let you use all of the information you've gathered in your reasoning. Once you've chosen a correct result, you can continue your investigation into the murders of Jack the Ripper.

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper offers an interesting feature that I don't think I've seen in an adventure title before. With the tap of the (R) key, you can switch between third-person and first-person perspectives, and the controls also switch to help fit that style of adventure game. I found this interesting because most games simply impose one of the views on you, but having the ability to switch between them gives you a bit of freedom. There were a couple of times when I simply couldn't find or see something that I needed to interact with in one mode, and switching to the other mode made things more apparent. Of course, about halfway through the game I realized that there was a key that showed you all of the items of interest in the room, but I tried to use that as little as possible.


Difficulty:

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper presented quite a few interesting puzzles, but the use of the Deduction Board made solving the crimes and drawing conclusions in a most Holmesian manner. It not only helped make the game feel like you were playing as the famous fictional detective, but also helps you through a lot of the tougher crime scenes.

As for the rest of the game, slight control issues aside, I had no problem following the bread crumbs the game laid out for me so I could find the different murder sites and talk to the people I needed to. It really comes down to standard adventure-game strategies like talk to everyone and click on anything that you can. If you do that, you shouldn't have too many problems making your way through the hunt for Jack the Ripper.


Game Mechanics:

Back to Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper's feature of letting you switch between third and first-person perspectives. While I found this to be a nice addition, I found both view's input implementations to be a little off. I can't quite put my finger on it, but using the WASD keys to walk and the mouse to move the camera for first-person mode didn't feel as natural as it should considering that its the standard controls for first-person shooters. I think it's the fact that most first-person adventure games don't take on that control scheme. Then again, there aren't that many first-person adventure titles these days, and the ones I can think of use the static-image approach instead of allowing you to walk around in a fully 3D environment. So while it took some getting used to, kudos should still be given for the effort. Especially since the developers tried to cut down on the input clutter by having the interaction-icons appear over the object just because you are glancing over them instead of forcing you to use your mouse for pixel hunting.

The only issue I had with the third-person perspective is that there seemed to be a bit of lag in the mouse movement, but that could be contributed to the hardware and not the game itself.

In the end, Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper offers a nice challenge, but the cat-and-mouse feel that you would expect from the combination of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper isn't as grandiose as I would have liked. In the end, it comes down to your interest in either of the two title characters.


-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer

Minimum System Requirements:



Windows 2000/XP/Vista, 1.3 GHz Pentium 3 or higher CPU, 512 MB RAM, 3 GB Hard Drive Space, DirectX 9 Compatible Sound Card, 128 MB DirectX 9.0c Compatible Video Card, 4x CD ROM
 

Test System:



Windows Vista Ultimate, AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core 2.20 GHz, 4 GB Ram, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Graphics Card, DirectX 9.0c

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