Syberia review:1 stars (Booooring and dumb) - Well, you may want to break your fingers or tear out your hair - that would be more fun than playing this sorry excuse for an adventure game. I think it's insulting to call this piece of cr*p an "adventure game" with games like Monkey Island, Leisure Suit Larry and Day of the Tentacle in this genre (among others.)
Graphics is nice, but that's about the only semi-positive statement about this "thing".
There was not one second when I liked the main character, the stupid, irritating bitch Kate Walker, a dumb lawyer from New York... although all other characters were just as irritating and idiotic as well.
The story had some potential but it was all wasted because the dialogue is horrible, voice acting sucks and the whole "game" is boring. 90% of the time, you walk around in meaningless, empty scenes, where you cannot even do anything other than walk around. The only reason for this, of course, is to make the otherwise extremely short game longer. (There is no way to speed up getting around, you have to wait for the stupid bitch to cross the screen all the time.)
You have to go back and forth between locations many times to do the same repetitive and uninspired "puzzles": pull levers and push buttons. In several cases, you have to cross 6 or seven screens to fetch an item.
Even though puzzles are overly simplistic, I still had to resort to a walkthrough, because of the immense amounts of pixel hunting. The game interface has a single command, so you cannot get information about things in the environment, you just basically click every hotspot in whatever order you discover them. Conversations are so bad and boring that every time I had to talk to other characters, I started moaning "Not again!" (I don't mind talkie adventure games, but I do expect to see/hear complete and meaningful sentences.)
Let's not forget to mention that the story is NOT complete, you HAVE to buy Syberia 2 to finish it (something I won't do.) I'd go as far as saying it's fraudulent and constitues false advertisement.
Avoid this trash at all costs. I'll never buy anything from the company that made it.5 stars (Syberia raised the bar on adventure games.) - The scenery and graphics in this game is really fabulous. Just the buildings' architecture, colors and room views alone bring you into a place that is both modern but a hundred years old.
The story line is good and although I did have to get hints from the website - UHS Hints, to help along at the most challenging times, that only added to the pleasure of the game (any game) because I could move on.
The movements of the protagonist, Kate Walker, are surprisingly realistic, (although Syberia 2 made them even more fluid).
One or two tasks are repeated in each "chapter" with a slightly different manner, such as winding the train for power before you can leave to the next city, and this familiarity is a confidence booster. If every single scene had all new logic, it would drive me nuts.
I actually finished this game and played it again, then bought Syberia 2 to repeat the fun. I hope they make a Syberia 3.2 stars (So much wasted potential) - I decided to buy this game a while back after reading such great reviews and was sorely disappointed. While the visuals were fantasic even the character movement and transistions flowed well on my dwindling PC; overall the game was too short. I managed to play the entire game in one sitting less than 3 hours with many, many, many breaks.
I enjoyed the 3rd person perspective as welcome change from other puzzle games (ie. Myst series). Converstations with other characters were usually rambling nonsense which one had to sit through to progress, the puzzles were simplistic, and in the end there isn't very much to this game. Its like playing connect the dots with an occasion errand to run every third dot.
The story line follows a young woman (you) looking for an old toy maker. To find him you'll have to ask towns peoples and rebuild some of his old toys. When you finally do find him and the game starts to get interesting it ends. You don't even go to Syberia! They should have called it "girl plays with complicated puppets". Okay maybe that title was too long.
Graphics are great but they sacrificed gameplay and story. Syberia Features: Computer Games Action Adventure CD Pentium® II 350 MHz processor, 64 MB RAM, 400 MB Free Hard Disk Space 16x CD-ROM Drive, 16 MB DirectX® compatible graphics card, DirectX® Compatible Sound Card DreamCatcher PC
Syberia is the CD-ROM version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around 19.99USD.