Rating: 
Summary: Too Boring
Review: Unlike the first Mysterious Journey, this game TOO many puzzles and is very boring. If you want to play a game for hours and days without getting anywhere, then this game is for you. I do nothing but workout and play games with my spare time, and this game isn't worthy of that time. I've played games like aliens vs predator 2, eternal darkness, rez evil, tomb raider, so I have plenty of patience when it comes to gaming. The graphics are stunning, but that's it for me. If you don't have the first game, then get it instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Right on the money.
Review: What can we say? My wife and I love puzzles! Some of our favorite adventure games have been absolutely packed with puzzles: Riven, Rhem, Schizm (the first Mysterious Journey) and Reah (the hard-to-find precursor to Schizm). We have just finished Mysterious Journey II - Chameleon, and I am glad to report that this game has puzzles in spades!We have also recently completed two other new adventure games, Uru - Ages of Myst and Journey to the Center of the Earth. In our minds, Chameleon is the best bang for the buck because it has about the same graphical *wow* as Uru, and much more logical and seamless puzzles than both Uru and Journey (check out our reviews of these other two games for more info). Obviously, a lot of comparisons can be made between this game and either its predecessor, Schizm, or its contemporary competition, Uru. In our review of Schizm, the biggest faults we gave it were that the live-acting was excruciatingly awful and it had a couple of really stinker (illogical, lateral) puzzles. However, Schizm made up for this by taking its players on an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous journey. The pre-rendered graphics of the DVD version of the game were some of the most awe-inspiring images ever put into a video game of any kind up to that point. For Chameleon, since the graphics are now constantly rendered in real time just like Uru, the level of details and lushness of the scenery has diminished just a skosh, but they are still drop-dead gorgeous. It only lacks the sheer immenseness of Uru. As a plus, the awful live acting of the Schizm has been replaced with 3D-rendered characters and more professional-sounding voice actors (although one female character near the end of the game was still painfully irritating - probably a girlfriend of one of the developers). But, you only see and hear the characters during the 3rd-person cutscenes while the rest of the game is played in the much more immersive 1st-person mode. As for the puzzles, they were some of the best we've played in quite a while. They weren't as interconnected as in some games (Riven and Rhem come to mind), but they were extremely varied in difficulty and always seamlessly integrated into the environments of the game. And, boy, were they fair puzzles, as well! Despite their difficulty at times, we only needed to get ONE hint during the entire game (on a particular puzzle that requires you to make a pretty illogical leap to come up with the solution). For all of the others, we were able to just buckle down and noodle out the answers on our own. People who do not like to work with alternate-base numbering systems or pattern observation should NOT get this game. It will frustrate you to no end. Just a couple of irritations (beyond the girl's voice). The game does not come with separate volume controls for speech, music and effects, so sometimes the background noises drowned out the critical conversations. Fortunately, they added the extremely helpful option of reading the game's transcript so you can go back and read what you missed. The music was very good but quite repetitive (hence the need for a separate control). Also, more than just a couple of the transport cutscenes were flat out missing. We were looking forward to riding some of the conveyances in the game (chairlift type devices) only to have it fade to black and then fade back in at the new location. Couldn't they have squeezed in a few more videos on the already beefy 3-CD game? Finally, these guys still cannot come up with a decent ending to their games. Like Reah and Schizm, the ending to Chameleon is pretty anti-climactic (although, as a whole, the story of the game was quite improved). In summary, we really enjoyed this episode and hope they continue to make many more Mysterious Journeys. If, like us, you were disappointed in the bloat (and puzzle cop-outs) of Uru, give this one a look.
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