Runaway: A Road Adventure
Score: 95% ESRB: Teen Publisher: Tri Synergy Developer: Pendulo Studios Media: CD/3 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: Runaway: A Road Adventure is a point-and-click adventure brought to the U.S. by Tri-Synergy and stands above all the others in the genre. It is a game that has great graphics and an awesome soundtrack. The cartoon style scenery goes great with the cel-shaded models and allows the player to become immersed in the Runaway world. The opening cinematic-style sequence is a wonderful example of how much effort and work was put into making this game. As you fly around a bustling New York City, some high-powered music plays and concept art of scenes from the game is displayed. One of the first things to impress me in this game was the fact that Brian, the main character, didn't give generic 'you can't do that' type statements when I tried out something outrageous just to see if it would work (well, okay he didn't say it as much as other games in the genre). His statements were mostly tailored to the object or situation, which helped stave off the repetitiveness a lot. The music in Runaway is just as impressive, always staying low key and in the background until a major plot moment happens.
Gameplay: Runaway: A Road Adventure is broken up into 6 chapters across 3 packed disks. Your adventure will take you from a New York hospital, to a museum, into the desert to look through Hopi Indian ruins and into a ghost town called Douglasville. Your character is Brian, a recent graduate from Columbia University who is getting ready to head to California to go into a graduate degree program at Berkeley. But his trip goes on a wild tangent when he runs into (or should I say runs over) a dancer, Gina, from a local club, 'The Pink Iguana', and gets wrapped up in a plot involving an ancient Hopi relic, 20 million dollars and the Mafia. Unfortunately, it is hard to talk much about the story without revealing a few plot twists, so let's just say that very few of the people you will meet along the way are who they say they are. And who are some of these people you ask? They are everything from drag queens to hippies, and an alien seeking wacko (or is he a wacko??). By the time I beat Runaway, I had put a good many hours into it. But something I have found over the years is that you can't really tell how much content there is in a game by how long it takes to beat it (at least with adventure games) because it might take you several hours to get past a particular puzzle. So what I usually do in the case of this genre is play through it once more as fast as possible and skipping as much dialog as I can. Even skipping most of the dialog and as many cut scenes as I was allowed, it took me more than three hours to go through Runaway a second time. This fact alone put the game in high standings in my book.
Difficulty: I found that several times in Runaway: A Road Adventure I was stumped, and it was due in part to the how the game differed from others in the genre. The main reason was that just because an item on the screen would generate a response from Brian (as opposed to just scenery), it isn't necessarily something that will help further the story. This is atypical to the genre; usually if your character recognizes something, it will be used. By the time I got past the first chapter, 'Wake Me Before Dying', I had adapted to this change, but between that change and the fact that Brian will see objects in different lights after you have done other deeds (for example, just because you see something that might help you, doesn't mean that Brian will until you do something else), this is not the easiest point-and-click adventure out there. I found myself backtracking a lot and kicking myself a bit when I finally got past some major puzzle. To summarize, this isn't a typical adventure game as far as difficulty is concerned, but with a bit of thought, all of the puzzles can be gotten through.
Game Mechanics: One of the first things that struck me while playing Runaway: A Road Adventure was how well Pendulo Studios blended the cel-shaded models with the scenery and sprites. Once I got engrossed in the game, I forgot that the characters were done in a different style then everything else in the game. The development team gets major props for this achievement. As far as the controls, everything is point-and-click, and each of the items of interest has two options, 'look' and 'use' (which also becomes 'grab' or 'open' or whatever makes sense for that particular item), which can be chosen by using the right or left mouse button. You can get to Brian's inventory by tapping the tab button or moving the cursor to the top of the screen (outside of the letterbox area) and choosing the paper bag with Pendulo's logo on it. Runaway is an awesome game that I would recommend to any avid adventure fan. It takes the typical point-and-click adventure game, and brings it to a whole new level in the way of puzzles, music, graphics and storyline.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Minimum System Requirements: Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP; Pentium 200 MMX; 64 Mb Ram; 631 Mb of hard disk; Monitor and graphics card (compatible DirectX) with support for 1024x768 and 16 bits of color; DirectX compatible sound card; CD-ROM 8X   Test System: Toshiba Satellite series laptop; Windows XP Home Ed.; 2.0 Ghz Celeron; 512 Mb RAM; 24X DVD/CD ROM; 32 Mb 3D Accelerator
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