Riddle of the Sphinx 2: The Omega Stone
Score: 95% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: The Adventure Company Developer: DreamCatcher Interactive Media: CD/4 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: I have been a fan of adventure games since the days of the classic Lucasarts products like The Dig, Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road. When Myst came out, I thought it had opened up a new aspect in the adventure genre. Since then, I have seen many companies attempt to reproduce the quality and style that Myst brought to the PC and they generally failed. One such company is The Adventure Company, and I think they finally got it. Riddle of the Sphinx 2: The Omega Stone is an adventure game that will keep you absorbed and racking your brain over many puzzles, puzzles that help you discover a link between many ancient monuments. In the past, Myst-clones have used static and rather stiff graphics to display their surroundings, but The Omega Stone does it right. Instead of just wrapping a blurry, poorly detailed bitmap around you, it appears that they have created a 3D environment and placed you in the middle of it. If this isn't what they've done, then kudos to them, because that's what it feels like. The music and sound effects generally stay out of the way and in the background, but are set at the right tone and seem to help induce the amount of critical thinking necessary to solve many of the puzzles found in The Omega Stone.
Gameplay: Riddle of the Sphinx 2: The Omega Stone starts off where its prequel ended. You are awakened by Sir Gil Blythe Geoffreys (who plays the part of 'Mr. Exposition' as far as the storyline goes) from the previous game. He tells you that he has started translating the second scroll and it speaks of a great danger that will befall the world in the present time (2/14/2012, according to your site passes). He charges you with the challenge of finding objects referred to only as Omega Disks, for they may be the key to stopping the devastating event. You travel around the world (Stonehenge, Easter Islands, South America, and The Devil's Triangle) in search of these disks. Along the way you must solve puzzles that will reveal to you a link between these locations. The puzzles themselves are rather straightforward and many times don't take too much effort to solve. They are the typical, 'manipulate several objects in a certain order', or 'revisit an area after you have made some change to the environment' puzzles common to the genre. You can also take pictures of your surroundings. This is so that you can quickly refer to older scenes or items without having to trek to that location. This is especially good since many times, the object you wish to see is at a different site (which means a different CD).
Difficulty: As I said above, Riddle of the Sphinx 2: The Omega Stone is filled with puzzles typical to many adventure games. You must examine artifacts and observe your surroundings to solve these puzzles, and most of the time the answer is staring you in the face. Because of this, the game isn't exceptionally hard, but the mental exercise you get from them is still worth your while.
Game Mechanics: You move through the scenes in Riddle of the Sphinx 2: The Omega Stone in a slightly different manner than previous adventure titles. Instead of staring straight ahead and moving your cursor around the screen looking for hotspots, your cursor remains at the center, and the camera rotates and moves accordingly. This movement helps you feel like you are actually a part of the scene, instead of sitting in a room staring at a monitor. When you are over a hotspot that allows you to move closer to an object, the small triangle that is your cursor lights up, whereas if it is an object you can examine, the triangle becomes a magnifying glass. Riddle of the Sphinx 2: The Omega Stone is a must buy for anyone who loves the adventure genre and is looking for some good problems to solve.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Minimum System Requirements: Windows 98, Pentium II 300 MHz, 64 MB Ram, 12X CD-ROM, DirectX compatible Video Card   Test System: Windows XP Professional, 600 MHz AMD Athlon, G-Force 3 Ti200, 384 MB Ram, SoundBlaster Live! Value, 52X CD-ROM.
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