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It seems that as Julie progresses further along her quest, she is wearing less and less... anyway, the armor certainly doesn't help. There are three pieces of armor - no, it's not a breastplate, helmet, and greaves. The designers must've been out of it, but her full set of body armor consists of left forearm, right knee, and left shoulder pieces. Each piece on its own reduces damage by a small amount, but having all three together is reduced much more.
Graphics and Sound
The graphics are simply gorgeous. The environment is simply stunning, even at 640x480x16 resolution. As a third person 3D action game, the mouse controls the camera angle. Most times the graphics are smooth, even with my lowly Voodoo 3 2000. After a couple of hours of play, however, everything slows down to a crawl when there is alot happening on the screen (gibs, rockets, dive-bombing birds...). Nothing that rebooting won't fix.
Beautiful graphics are matched with beautiful sounds. The sound effects are great, and the 3D positional audio is a nice feature. Each environment has its own unique set of sounds, as does each character, creature, and weapon.
Sadly, some minor problems crop up. Some clipping problems are evident, and in one case I think they applied a texture backward (since when did water flow up?). Julie's grunts of pain sound odd, though she has decent voice acting for other conversations. The NPC humans in Eden could use a few more polygons, though with my video card I'd rather have the frame rate.
Final Thoughts
While this is a great game, it most likely will not last very long on anyone's hard drives. The game, as it currently stands, has no multiplayer mode and no replay value. A free multiplayer patch is being planned, but the estimated release date is late September/early October. To top it off, it is short. I finished the game in about fifteen hours, and that includes a lot of time spent trying to reach obscure, out of the way places for goodies.
I have heard reports that this game is buggy and crashes often. Well, I only experienced one major bug that would crash my system, and that bug is fixed by the 1.02 patch. The game was eminently playable on a Celeron 566 with 128MB of RAM and a Voodoo 3 2000, although it gets too choppy too quickly with a K6-2 400 and an ATI Rage 99.
Because this game is so short, I cannot give it my full recommendation.
Overall Score: 75%
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