Genre : Adventure
Publisher: Got Game Ent.
Developer: Anima Interactive
Release Date: November 1, 2003

Conspiracies is Anima Studios first title on the gaming market. This Greek company and their American publisher, Got Game, have brought to us the latest adventure game to hit the market. Featuring an involved story line with a twisting plot, Conspiracies also challenges the player with over 200 puzzles that will work your brain out. The game's story is pretty decent and did win some award for best sci-fi story of the year. However, that is about all that is good with this game. Conspiracies' development started back in 1998 and the graphics show it.

You'll be treated, if you want to call it a treat, to full-motion video actors pasted against cheap-looking CGI backgrounds for all of the dialogue scenes. B-movie level actors portray conspiracies' characters during these video scenes. The acted scenes are what actually advance the game's story, usually triggered after completing a puzzle and then talking to a certain character. Now, I own and have many of the old full-motion video games from the 3DO and SegaCD era of games, and even they make Conspiracies' video look bad. The video is poorly implemented with the cheesy-looking backgrounds giving the soft white glow around the moving video, which clashes quite often during the video segments.
Clicking on new locations on the fairly large world map traverses conspiracies' world. Once you've clicked on a new area the game will load it up and you'll either see a new video sequence or end up in the other part of game play: the 3d environment. This is where 1998 screams from back in the past. You'll navigate around a poorly constructed, textured and lighted 3D world of simplistic models including humans made out of 2D sprites.

Movement in this 3D world is achieved via the arrow keys and a use key. Clicking on various objects will sometimes produce basic movement and yield results to help aid you in solving whatever your current puzzle may be. When you do find new items you'll pick them up and drop them into your inventory, which is somewhat small and clunky as far as interface with it goes. Often times you'll find yourself full with items you might want to save and end up having to return to your apartment to drop them all on the floor. This method is annoying and time consuming due to the fact that you have to drop each item one by one. The other thing to do in the 3D mode is to click on the previously mentioned 2D sprite images of people. Doing so will trigger a video sequence as well as display a list of keywords you can then ask the person you are questioning.

Not every question will get you any information you can use, in fact, a lot of the time you will get the same three canned responses. This obviously isn't any fault of the developers, but it is quite annoying once the list of questions gets extremely large. Conspiracies' puzzles range from common sense to brainteasers. Usually you'll find yourself accessing your inventory and combing items to solve puzzles. Also in your apartment is your fax/computer machine from which you'll receive letters and clues from various people and even attempt some hacking. Hacking consists of entering the right keyword and the reading the information you need to advance in the game. It's pretty cut and dry, but it works nonetheless.

The sound in Conspiracies is pretty bad. The voice acting in Greek is tolerable but the English overdubs are terrible. Emotion is present in the voice actor's lines, but it's cheesy, over the top emotional most of the time. As bad as it is the dialogue does fit the game's setting rather well, which isn't saying much but still. The game's music is standard techno music played throughout on loop. I can't complain about it too much since it isn't overbearing techno and is more ambient. It's not bad it's just boring despite fitting in perfectly with the game's futuristic sci-fi setting. Items sound like you'd expect them to sound, nothing too special or bad in that department.

I don't like slamming a game no matter how bad it is, so I tried not to with Conspiracies. It's very obvious that a lot of time and work went into this project and for an adventure game I suppose it's not the worst one out there. However, the terrible video quality coupled with the simplistic and cheesy 3D world as well as the overdubbed voices really ruined the game for me. I know graphics do not make a game, but those games are usually at least fun. The game was not fun for me even with what is a decent sci-fi murder case. Its negative factors outweigh any of the positives the game has going for it. Don't get me wrong, a challenging, time intensive game isn't something I don't enjoy, however, I only enjoy them when they are done well. Anima's Conspiracies was not done very well at all and I hope that when they create the sequel they will have a larger budget and more time to make it less unattractive in all areas except story.

I get the feeling diehard adventure game fans; especially those who enjoyed the Tex Murphy games wouldn't mind giving Conspiracies a go through. Everyone else should probably stay away for his or her own good.

Score : 3.5/10