It’s been too long since I sat down and played through a PC adventure game, so when I received Viva Media’s The Immortals of Terra – A Perry Rhodan Adventure for review, I was excited. Not only had it been a while since I jumped into what is probably still my favorite gaming genre, but this title looked intriguing. Turns out, while it’s not a great game, it is very good and adventure fans should strongly consider this title for purchase.
Into Space
Players take the role of Perry Rhodan, an accomplished space military officer and an immortal, or at least one that can live for 3,000 years. You currently live on a space station and when the adventure begins, the entire facility is under attack from an unknown alien force. A female combatant, who you will find out very soon is Mondra, is kidnapped by these robotic, invading forces. Guards and servicemen around the station are in a rush to repair and defend, but your friend, Bully, has you confined to this area of the station, near your quarters, but you don’t know why. You immediately find out that Mondra has been kidnapped, and your first order of business is to get on the trail of the kidnappers. While I haven’t quite completed the game yet, the majority of the story is about finding Mondra and solving several other intriguing mysteries along the way involving murder and betrayal.
For adventure fans like myself, there is a lot to like about The Immortals of Terra. To begin with, the developers at Braingame did a pretty good job of establishing characters, relationships, history, and their universe. I was impressed with the amount of detail that was put in into describing the objects and phenomenon that Perry encounters. Most of this information is discovered in either long conversations with NPCs, or in text output from various computer terminals throughout the game whereby you can ‘use’ your items with the computer to find out a lot about them. For those gamers that like to really get into their games and explore the universe, this is a good thing.
One of the important elements to any point-and-click adventure is undoubtedly the puzzles players encounter. To that end, I will say that The Immortals of Terra is fairly well rounded. Most of the puzzles you encounter will pit Perry Rhodan against the environment; and you will either need the help of an NPC or a computer terminal to get through. Talking with NPCs is a bit more trimmed down than you might expect from adventure games. You can click on an NPC, but you cannot guide the conversation in any path, unless you click on an item in your inventory (which can also include an avatar for another character in the game) and then click on the NPC you’re talking to. In other words, you cannot choose from a predetermined set of dialogue sentences, like in most point-and-click adventures I’ve played. This isn’t so much a drawback as a difference, but I thought it worth mentioning. Overall, the puzzles Perry encounters are fairly straightforward with moderate difficulty. Some are trickier than others, like guiding the model spaceship through the ventilation system at the Academy, and solving the puzzle at the museum on Titan, but again overall, the puzzles are reasonable.
As far as the general pace, story, and mechanics of Immortals of Terra, it’s sufficient, but not really great. I found it hard to start this game at times, because honestly, it’s fairly dry in parts. The situation, the characters, even the environments sometimes require a little more effort on your part to dive into. What I often found to be the case with this game and me though was that if I gave it about ten minutes, the appeal was renewed and I was back into figuring things out. My favorite adventure games only become unappealing or hard to start back into whenever I’ve played for many hours on end or am severely stuck, in contrast. Oh, I should mention that one neat mechanic to this title is how you can use your wrist device to scan a room; you simply press S, and a field sweeps down your screen, showing, briefly, all of the interesting objects or paths in the room; this makes finding items much easier and it’s a welcomed feature.
Rundown
The Immortals of Terra is an all right looking game. Some areas look a lot nicer than others, but the character animations and texture quality are definitely dated. Also, interacting with objects and NPCs, especially when passing items between each other, isn’t very well done; the object, or in some cases Rhodan’s hand when touching a keypad, isn’t even visible, or his hand just hovers well above the keyboard. These miscues are forgivable, but notable. The best looking parts of the adventure are some of the environments; the entrance to the museum on Titan was great.
In terms of audio, the most important aspect here is the dialogue. I’ve been satisfied with the dialogue, if not impressed in parts. Perry Rhodan’s voiceover work is consistently good, and generally, all voices sound good. The soundtrack isn’t too powerful or noticeable, but it does a fine job. Lastly, other effects are also low-key but purposeful.
To sum up, The Immortals of Terra: A Perry Rhodan adventure is a good adventure game. It’s not a classic, and it’s not great – but it’s something all adventure gamers, even sci-fi fans, should check out, especially for the going price online of around $18.
