CD-ROM DOES NOT MEAN FUN
A Review of MILO
by Michael J. Bertrand
The modern multimedia revolution has brought many splendid and wondrous things to the PC gaming market. It gives us the capacity to have CD-quality sound, crisp and beautiful. It lets us have video clips, which can turn a game into cinema. And the massive storage capacity of the CD allows for games of breathtaking scope, unheard of before.
However, none of these elements is a guarantee for a successful game, and MILO is the perfect case in point.
In this game, you are given the challenge: solve the 14 puzzles
scattered around the realm of MILO, an artificially intelligent computer constructed by a race which
has found the keys of the universe and long since gone 'somewhere else', presumably to find the locks
the keys fit into. If you succeed, MILO will impart upon you the knowledge of the ages. Fail, and
you get stuck wandering around this place forever. Sounds almost interesting, doesn't it?
But what you get when you buy MILO is basically 14 fairly simple puzzles, admittedly well-done, but with some serious flaws which make this title much less than it could have been.
First of all, the game makes claims as to being a 3-D game. In my never
particularly humble opinion, it is not. It is instead a group of pretty pictures strung
together as to form a vague sort of three-dimensional effect, but with absolutely nothing one can
do besides start games and wander around amongst this 'world', it lacks any real 3-D feel. The
pictures are entirely static. You might as well be wandering through a GIF collection. This game might
have passed as 3-D six years ago, but in the modern era of Doom and Myst, 3-D is a totally
different thing.
Then there is the interface for this game. It often just plain makes no sense. Because of the static nature of the 'world', you are left with a limited number of angles you can see any area by. And it is quite easy to find yourself in the position where you can't turn directly at something. You wind up coming up on doors sideways and other ridiculous things.
The main problem, which is partially caused by the previous two, is
that the game plays extremely slow. You are forced to click through endless dull rooms just to
get to the puzzles. Add to this the necessity to use the 'aircar' when moving between puzzle rooms,
involving a lengthy power-up sequence and sitting through a tedious AVI animation, and the game
practically begs you to lose all interest in it.
Not that there are no good elements to the game. The music is of very pleasant New Age sort, and the art, while static and boring, is quite beautiful. And the puzzles themselves, once you actually get to them, are interesting if rather difficult. One feature which I particularly like is the way difficulty is controlled: at the beginning of your adventure, you're given three 'wildcards'. With these wildcards, you can decrease the difficulty of one of the fourteen puzzles. Each puzzle starts with a difficulty level of three, so if you have a REAL problem with one puzzle, you can reduce it to a very easy level, but it will cost you two of your precious wildcards.
But even the puzzles are not without some irritating mistakes. The help
system is all spoken, no text, and you often cannot hear the spoken instructions over the
music. Didn't these people actually PLAY this game before releasing it? And while you're playing
the puzzles, the computer will throw in little comments, like "Interesting approach" and "you
won't get it THAT way" which are cute the first few times but get annoying very quickly.
And the slowness, the clunkiness, and the feeble attempt at three
dimensions are such a persistent nuisance that it makes one truly wonder what the designers were
thinking. They would have been much better off simply packaging these fourteen games together
with a menuing interface and the music attached, and skipped the whole pseudo-mystical
science fiction aspect entirely. But then, I suppose, it wouldn't be 'multimedia' enough.
Multimedia is, indeed, a wonderful technology and used properly, it can make magic. But when used simply to try to spice up an otherwise pedestrian game, it only serves to irritate. I do not recommend this game for anyone but die-hard puzzle addicts, and even they will have solved puzzles similar to many of these before.
Gamer's Zone Scorecard
| Product: |
MILO |
| Company: |
Crystalvision Software
|
| Cost: |
$39.95 |
System Requirements:
IBM PC or 100 percent compatible, 486 DX 33 Mhz or better processor,
8 MB RAM, Windows 3.1 and higher or Windows 95,
Super VGA Graphics Card (640x480, 256 colors),
MPC compliant sound card, mouse or other pointing device,
Hard Disk with 6 megabytes of free space
and a double-speed CD-ROM or better.
Breakdown:
Fun Factor 2
Graphics 3
Sound 4
Interface 1
Replayability 1
Overall Score:
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