Lost: Via Domus

As a gamer with a love of the English language and incredibly strong opinions I have a great white whale of a dream, to professionally write for a game review site or magazine. But unfortunately I have not acquired a high enough education (still in college) or the proper geographical location (California) to do this...yet. Anyway I often find in my time working at GameStop that people just love to buy really horrible video games. I, of course, guide them away from these puss ridden boils like a shepherd guiding his flock. But some still refuse to listen and end up walking out the door with the latest digital blasphemy. So, I am now turning to this vast and mighty internet to possibly hone my skill at analytical review.

First up...LOST: Via Domus. Now the reason why I picked this game as the first is because I, as a LOST fan could not write this game off as bad before I played it. Now that is not to say that I did not want to. But simply, as a LOST fan, I had to play through the game for the story and ignore the obviously bad game from the git-go.

Visuals: This is not a very pretty game. Which, of course, is quite a shame seeing that LOST is arguably the most beautiful show on television. The folliage itself is the highlight of the game's visual department. But the textures are a mess, with all of the colors coming off rather bland. The character models fare even worse. Mouths don't match up very well with their vocal emphasis, and the characters, including your own, have a very "boxy" sort if movement. Also, the black smoke monster from the series, which I thought would be the one thing that would have been done right, just does not move with the snake like elegance of show's beloved "Smokey"

Sound: Oh sweet baby Jesus...the sound. The sound is atrocious. Now I admit that I am being a bit harsh here in that I am basing said atrocity of the sound on just one thing, the voice acting. In a show that is driven by its magnificent cast, it is expected that at least a fair majority of the actors would loan their voices to the title. But alas, very few actors reprise their roles, including the title figures. The few characters that do have their proper voices (Ben, Claire, Desmond, Tom, Juliet, Sun, and maybe one other) fair quite well. That is with the exception for Sun, who only has two dialog trees in the whole game and one of them is in Korean. This of course has its reason, but if she was going to have such a small part I can barley even appriciate her inclusion. As for the so called "voice-a-likes", they can hardly be called as such.

The Voice-A-Likes: Yeah, they are so bad I'm giving them their own section. I don't know who these criminals of dialog are, but that might be for the better. Jack, Kate, and Sayid all have mildly competent stand-ins, but others do not fair so well. Hurley sounds like he has a runny nose while eating a sandwich. Charlie is done with just a really bad falceto English accent. Sawyer has a painfully bad Southern twang. Lastly, and worst of them all, Locke is done with what can only be called the voice of an ol' timey prospector. "There's gold in them there hatches!"

Gameplay: Having a category for gameplay invokes the idea that there is any to judge. You essentially run from lame puzzle to flash back to lamer puzzle. Every aforementioned puzzle in the game is a bad rip-off of Bioshock's hacking program. You need to redirect the flow of power from the main circuit to gauges that can only hold so much of said power. After you distribute the power to the gauges the door unlocks. Dialog trees are present, but never so engaging as those in Mass Effect. You are encouraged to pick up various items to trade for other items. This is way overblown, seeing that you only need two candy bars and five bottle of waters to buy the only gun in the game, and a few more bottles of water to buy a few torches.

The Gun: Yeah, the gun gets its own section too. This gun is a sham. The developers of the game said they took creative license with the property (ie LOST) and added more action to make the game more interesting. I fired my gun four times throughout the entire duration of the game. That is right...four times. I shot two people and two bundles of dynamite. Wow...they added a whole heap of action to this game...yep.

The Ending: Now I won't spoil it for any of you still wanting to play the game after reading this, or any of the other negative reviews, but the ending is either awesome...or completely horrendous. I still have not made up my mind on this one, I still think it was awful, but it might...just might be pretty cool. It all depends on if the creators include the dynamic of ending as part of the rules of the island. You can find the ending on Youtube if you'd just like to see it, and not suffer through the game as I did.

Conclusion: As a game LOST: Via Domus is pretty much a total failure. Anyone who is not a dedicated LOST fan will be totally confused, in that the game offers no plot synopsis. As a piece of LOST mythology, it also ultimately fails. The ending is not very clear and the rest of the plot is skipable at best. Your character is about as interesting as Niki and Paulo, and his story is not very interesting as a stand alone or as part of the over arching Hanso/Dharma/Others plot. In the end, don't buy this game, just talk to me or someone else who has beat the game to get the oh-so-interesting storyline.