Coming into Adam’s Venture I had the impression that it would be an action packed adventure game similar to Uncharted through the story telling and quest for ancient relics. However, there is little to no action and the game is just a constant trail to solve silly puzzles. Thrown together with clunky gaming mechanics and atrocious voice acting really creates a distressful amalgam.

Gameplay & Design :

Puzzles in game are perfectly fine in games like this where they are needed to open an ancient chamber or great riches but the puzzles here are simply forced. Once entering a rooftop area I am told to turn one of the character’s windmills for his experiments, which were never explained. But after running across the rooftops and completing simple puzzles to turn three of the windmills on, I had to return to that character where he would explain what he knew about the area we were trying to find. Just as I was getting ready for some dialogue and a break from the relentless puzzles that had occurred previous to the windmills, the game pulled a puzzle for me to get the projector to work, allowing me to start the cut scene. This puzzle like many of the puzzles was not explained in the slightest and I was guessing about how to solve it for 20 minutes. After guessing and “solving” the puzzle it gave a slide show that frankly could have been explained on a paper without that puzzle. In other words, a waste of time. There are frankly just too many puzzles, there needs to be some action or at least a significant payoff for the effort, but in the end it is just more senseless puzzles. The game was marketed as an adventure game with puzzles but it feels more like a bunch of puzzles with some adventure.

Presentation/ Visuals & Audio:

One of the main aspects of this game that is such a deal breaker is the terrible, almost robotic voice acting. Its really quite astounding, the characters almost seem robotic so much of the time, so much of the dialogue is spoken in a creepily monotone style is just isn’t right. Although it isn’t entirely the voice actors’ faults because the script they were given is very poorly written and incredibly cheesy. Sometimes Adam has his funny moments at times but overall the dialogue is forgettable at best.

To my surprise, this game is only on Xbox One, PS4, and PC. I was sure that it was gonna be on last-gen as well, but it was not. The graphical fidelity is so poor that I really was surprised, by no means did it have to be the on the unreal 4 engine but the fire, flora, and characters all looked like they were out of game from 2006. The only upside with the graphics was that they seemed to consistently get 60 fps. Plus the controls were pretty solid overall and were not twitchy like some games. Even though the controls felt decent, the animations from them were still very clunky and awkward. It looked, again like a game from 2006.

Conclusion:

Adam’s Venture Origins is a very forgettable game that fails to have restraint with their constant puzzles. Although, a fair amount of these puzzles are actually decent and engages the player fairly well. Adam also has a humorous personality at times, but the overwhelming amount of poorly written dialogue and forgettable voice acting makes an annoying combination. At the point in time where decent graphics for a game like this is imperative it fails on that goal with ease. This is a game that is boring and forgettable, that is annoying and really has many problems that need to addressed if there is going to be another addition to this series.

Adam’s Venture Origins gets a 4/10 (Bad)

We’d like to thank Soedesco for sending us a code!

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