Review: Emotions: The Search for Humanity
Emotions by GEK Studios
With the news of GEK Studios getting back in the RISC OS scene, I thought I would review one of their games.
My first impressions of Emotions, frankly, are quite good. Your introduction to the game is a cinematic scene in a rather unique style of a goofy looking person with buck teeth called Henky-Penky sleeping. He wakes up and looks in the mirror, he decides that his life is too plain and boring without emotions so decides to go on an adventure of a lifetime, a quest for humanity. The main objective of the game is that you must collect the emotion yellow faces while avoiding or killing monsters and mind-boggling puzzles!
Emotions is available on the GEK collection from APDL at the very cheap price of £6.90 and an extra £1.00 for carriage outside the UK. The installation process for Emotions is very easy, but you have to install !GEKonfig if you haven't previously. It ran well on our test machine, a StrongARM Risc PC running RISC OS 4.37 (Select 3i3).
Unforunately, when the introduction scene finished it returned to ugly Mode 13 and a pretty weird menu system.
The graphics are now sadly ageing and don't look very attractive compared with high-graphics games such as TEK 1608 and Heroes of Might and Magic 2.
There are lots of nice weapons, including the machine gun and also a chainsaw that splatters blood all over the place.
A feature that I find really good is the ability to listen to a tracker song of your choice while playing, so if a track gets annoying, you simply change it!
The gameplay isn't very mind-blowing. After finishing the first really easy level, you need to switch your brain on to solve some of the puzzles involved. Unfortunately, a lot of the puzzles are repeated and get rather boring.
Overall, it's a nice game and for £6.90 along with over half a dozen other games included, Emotions is certainly the best of the lot. Hopefully, GEK will use some of the good features of this and their other games in other projects, such as the cut-scenes. Also, what do you guys think of an Emotions 2? I would certainly buy it if it were ever to be developed and released. The gameplay isn't very good, neither are the graphics, but it's still fun to play! I give this game a pretty decent 6/10 - Tepid.
