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Tuesday, December 23, 2008 |
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Global Conflicts: Latin America
By DeuS @ 9:33 PM :: 1521 Views ::  :: PC
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Global Conflicts:
Latin America is a serious game. It is made by the very serious people
at Serious Games Interactive. It provides a serious outlook on the
highly serious problems faced by the people in parts of South America.
I'm sure that by now, you as a reader are seriously confused. But I'm
pretty serious about this game review. In fact I'm grimacing as I write
this review about Global Conflicts: Latin America.
Describing GC: LA in terms of a gamer's vocabulary is a rather
difficult matter. In terms of game-play it lies somewhere between an
adventure game and a visual novel along with an element of a guided
tour thrown in to make you feel impressed or rather more accurately,
make you feel disgusted at the content presented by the game. As the
title suggests, the basic setting of the game is spread across
locations in Central America and Mexico as well as locations in South
America. The general idea is to expose the gamer to the harsh realities
and the inhuman conditions that people of those parts of the world have
to face. You start off with making a choice to play as the female
journalist or the male counterpart, both of whom are conveniently of
Hispanic ancestry and seem to have pretty ideal and righteous
personalities. Definitely well suited to a game about exploring the
depraved conditions of people in Latin America I'm sure.
Game-play wise Global Conflicts: Latin America does not offer
anything new. It offers nothing which can remotely be called engaging
in terms of game-play. You are presented a point-and-click interface
and that is the limit of interaction you will have with the game. You
click to move around; double click to run to a location. Every zone you
move around with is pretty small in size and it is absolutely pointless
clicking into far reaches of the area your character is in currently
since there's literally nothing out there. Your character will not go
beyond maybe 50-70 paces of their starting location in any zone
throughout the game. This title is pretty constraining for something
which defines itself as an 'Adventure' game in my opinion. What is the
adventure in moving around in a 50 x 50 feet space?
Every zone is sparsely populated with a few blocky buildings and a
dozen or less people. That includes the driver that hangs around to
transport you to different locations within a current chapter or
scenario. You would interact with maybe a couple of the other folks
about the current story your investigating, talk about violence,
poverty, injustice and so on. Basically it's just a matter of walking
up to people and constantly clicking a no. of icons to let them express
their sentiments on the issue at hand. Sometimes, some topics will be
left grayed out. It means you figure out some other stuff from another
source such as following up by doing research in the local library or
talking to another individual (mostly the only other guy you can talk
to in the 50 x 50ft space) and figure out more information before
coming back to it.
Your main activity throughout the game simply put is reading. You
have to trudge through a lot of text. A lot of people are going to tell
you about crime and poverty and pollution and injustice and so on and
on for quite a while throughout the game. At the end of each chapter,
there is a major interview you conduct with the head honcho responsible
for the entire mess and you try to corner him with your arguments and
statements that you've collected over your investigation period. You do
get a limited time to spend before the interview takes place though, so
you would need to exercise some conversational tact to find out the
most relevant bits of information from the sources so as to manage to
score maximum points off the final “Boss” interview. The basic goal is
to get him to reach a high level of stress indicated by a
“Stress-o-meter” at the top left of the screen by asking him the right
questions and presenting the right arguments relevant to the current
discussion. Eventually he'll break down and admit to killing the
kittens or whatever it is about the heinous crime's that he's committed.
In any case, this game is not one to blow the game-play horn
about. In fact, even the graphics horn for that matter can definitely
be left silent. The character models look similar to those used in the
PS2 version of GTA: San Andreas which I'm sure a lot of you would be
familiar with. Couples that with the sparse amount of geometry that you
actually see in the game environment, you basically have a game that
will run perfectly well on your grandma's old iMac G3. You can probably
get her this game as revenge for getting you "Brain Train: Retarded
Edition" the previous years Xmas.
Eventually the game starts feeling no different from reading something
like a rather hard hitting book about some questionable business
practices exercised by some key companies which have affected the rest
of the world. ("Fast Food Nation" comes to mind) If that’s your thing,
then you probably would enjoy it to a certain regard like I did. But
your time would probably be better spent watching the Discovery channel
or BBC for something equally depressing going on in Eastern Europe or
starving kids in Africa or India or something.
7/10.
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