Adventure games are not what they used to be and the same could be said about Dead Reefs released by CDV games. What could be an entertaining adventure, really turns to a point where after a few hours boredom sits in and you are looking for sleeping pills to keep you up.

Story/Gameplay

The story for Dead Reefs begins based off of a mystery that surrounds a cursed island with pirate history as the backdrop. Enter our main character, the hero, the investigator……. Sir Amadey Finvenero, who will unravel the mystery of the cursed island of boredom. I found it rather odd that odd that when the twist of the game hit, that we changed directions. I feel like this is one of the issues with Dead Reefs, if the developer would have stuck with the original formula things could have been much more interesting. I find it crazy that as we talk to potential suspects one minute, they are nowhere to be found for the rest of the game. It’s like they took their important belongings and left the cursed island, running for their lives. I’m not too sure what the developer was trying to achieve here, but it felt like they started off fairly strong and then with each passing moment the story just fell apart.

One thing that affects the story big time is the dialogue and how it is presented. It’s one thing if we have bad dialogue and there isn’t a sync issue when people talk. This is one big detractor from someone really enjoying the game, I wonder where QA was that they allowed this to pass through.

We are also lucky enough to have puzzles included in the game, and while puzzles are great from keeping this type of genre from getting boring, it doesn’t help when there are some frustrating puzzles thrown in the mix. There are some puzzles in here that will make you pull all the strands of hair left on your head.

Graphics

We look at story as being a very important piece of a game, but when that falls through the next thing that some care about is the graphics while others are worried about the controls. I found the environment to look descent and very creepy helping make this feel like one cursed island. That is where the graphics stopped to look descent, the characters themselves just look drab and boring. They lack enough detail to make them look passable in a game this day and age.

Controls

Another area where Dead Reefs fails is the controls, and I find it rather mind boggling that they would only allow keyboard use in a game like this. No mouse support limits some of the functionality that is mapped to third person games for movement. Granted we still have the keyboard, keyboard + mouse is the best combo that I feel works for these games.

The camera is a over the head view which reminds me a lot of games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, etc. The camera moves rather quick with your movement, but at times it feels like the camera moves way too much which can make someone with motion sickness rather sick.

Closing Comments

I try to stay as positive as possible when reviewing videogames due to all the time and effort that is put in by these developers. Dead Reefs is an adventure that I would not want to partake in, its not fear of the cursed island, its fear that I will break my computer from the frustrations that have been bestowed upon us. I find the atmosphere to be the best part of this game, the rest of it is what brings the whole package down. Save your hard earned cash on this one, and put that money towards an adventure game that will provide satisfaction from start to finish.