Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as I had hoped
Review: (...)P>I started out liking this game a lot, but as it progressed, I liked it less and less. What I really look for in a game is a first-person perspective, a plot or story that you have to uncover by solving a variety of puzzles, not getting killed, good graphics and decent sound, pretty much in that order. While I found all these things in Schizm and they were enough to keep me interested, the game had problems enough that I became increasingly angry and frustrated with it.Schizm was designed for DVD and it shows. The CD-Rom version not only has less of a game, but also does not run particularly well. Panning is slow. Sound halts and stutters. Sometimes the game freezes altogether. Allegedly you can correct this by using the full install, but about every time I tried this, the install procedure crashed my computer. The one time I managed to get it fully installed, the game ran in Hungarian or some other Eastern European language, so I had to go back to swapping discs anyway. This game is complex. Sometimes it seems arbitrarily complex -- that is, the complexity really interfers with enjoyment of the game. The two character perspective starts out as intriguing but just becomes a pain as you can't ever move them at the same time, but have to keep going back and forth between them even when they're supposed to be together. Several times this involved swapping discs half a dozen times in the space of thirty seconds of gameplay. They come up with a lame plot element to explain this, but it's still a drag, especially since there is no zip feature to speed you past places you've already been. A zip feature would have been very helpful. The puzzles range from somewhat hard to extremely difficult. Often the difficulty stems less from mental capacity needed to solve them than from some arbitrary complexity that just seems put there to make the puzzle hard. For example, several puzzles contained so many variables that even when you knew the logic involved you still had to spend an inordinate amount of time going through the variables to find the one that worked. Some indication of the correct path would have been helpful. (Spoiler) The sound puzzles in general were ill-conceived. I really think if you're going to have sound based puzzles in a game you should make the sounds thins like tones or bells or rhythms, or even snatches of music -- things that are easily recognizable. Trying to understand an alien language that sounded like badly recorded backwards masking was just too much. There were a lot of inconsistencies in the alien culture, as well. Why should you use one set of number symbols in one place and a completely different set in another? Because things were often so different from place to place, I, at least, had the feeling that I never really learned anything and was making no progress. There were a lot of things in the game I got that just didn't function. Mission logs that were supposed to be accessible were not accessible, characters who were supposed to appear did not appear. Fortunately everything that was absolutely necessary to the progression of the game happened, but I was in a constant state of anxiety that I would miss something vital. I was interested enough in Schizm not to quit, but I spent a lot of time in what seemed to be pointless busy-work and I never really felt like I knew quite what was going on or how to proceed. I like non-linear games, but at times Schizm seemed so non-linear as to be incoherent. Probably this is not a game that is going to keep you completely absorbed far past your bedtime, but it is a good game to play for a couple hours, then put away and come back to later.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I don't mind the graphics or interface of this game, but I do find the puzzles both trivial and frustrating. I don't much care for games that require me to keep detailed notes of obscure symbols, sounds, etc., some of which may be useful later. (I recognize that there are people that do enjoy this, and consider this a mark of a good game -- I'm simply not one of them. Since I don't usually play a game all at once, but over the course of two or three weeks, I find this process tedious.) I finally went to a walkthrough and, frankly, I never would have figured out the solution to the first puzzle. I'm not an idiot, and have played many of these kinds of games before, but this one is, in my opinion, not worth the trouble.
Rating:
Summary: Schizm: Mysterious Journey
Review: Why aren't you offering the DVD version of the game? It is available from Dreamcatcher--but they have been having problems at their website and it is impossible to order either on the internet or by phone. One wonders if they have this much problem with their ordering process, how good can the game be. ???
Rating:
Summary: And I was looking forward to this. To be specific...
Review: Well, the main reason I'm writing this is because there seemed to be a large lack of pride of the programmers, and it is reflected in the game.
----- Pride. In the flimsy booklet, and in the install procedure, you see that they will, and I quote, "gladly replace any disc free of charge, whether accidentally damaged or due to manufacturer defect." But, the very next sentence states that you have to send $8 for S&H [that's over 25% of the purchase price] and $2 for each extra disc [and again, that's even if it is damaged by the manufacturer, as stated. I mail CDs all the time for work... it costs about 75 cents... do they package it in lead? 'Free' has taken on a new meaning, as has their 'warranty'.
Moving to the game itself:
----- Characters. The voice actors were awful [probably my biggest negative, and hard to explain in type]... painful to listen to them... almost wanted to cut sound off and read subtitles. Listening to the woman 'heroine', I was just crying for Imoen, Charsi, or April Ryan. Wish they had spent the extra dollars and went with real actors. the guy hero... well... where's garret [or even Mr. Freeman or Max Payne] when you need him? [granted the actors may be very nice people, but they don't have game quality voices]. Actually, Jim Raynor would have been fantastic for this role.
----- Game settings... you have two settings: music volume, effects volume [oh, and subtitles on/off]. That's it. and the sound effects? Marginal. No video settings to tell the game "my system should have a stewardess on it, so throw as many triangles at the screen as you want." No video check, either. Nope... lowest common denominator, I suppose [which left it too blocky for my taste].
----- Interface. You can barely hear the walking sounds (so you don't know whether you're walking, or whether you're on a motorcycle, which seems like the case with the speed you move from room to room. But, that doesn't matter much, because you really don't have much control over where you can walk to... when you click to walk, you go automatically to where they want you to go, so you might as well just clip to there. There's not much looking around... stuff is either right in front of your face, or you don't get to look at it... but most scenery that you'd like to check out isn't available [plenty of doors on huts, etc, that are simply pretty scenery, even though you're right next to them and you're supposed to be investigating what's going on]. I'm left wondering, such as in the big lebowski, what's the point? What's the point of having all that scenery and what not, when there's a stiffly few things you can look at, and despite there being lots of 'stuff' around, you can't investigate it. It's as if there's puzzle A, and you need to solve puzzle A, and other than that, that's it. Once you do that, you move on. Why even have a game interface or story? The walking was somewhat similar to Riven [and the year it came out... no progress, which is what I was hoping for].
Sure -- the backgrounds are somewhat nice, but stick to dl'ing some pretty wallpaper and you'll have the same.... artwork on your desktop you can't do anything with.
Rating: 
Summary: Too much noise for nothing
Review: After too many ads and superb screenshoots I was really dissapointed. Don't expect that the real game is the same as the screenshots. The graphic is terrible compared to this in Myst III Exile. I expected to see something much better. Almost all graphics contain really big squares (10x10 or 15x15 pixels) and look like JPEG images that are compressed 70-80 times. Don't tell me that I have a hardware problem - I'm with PIII @ 1GHz, GeForce II, DirectX 8a and latest NVIDIA drivers, and games like Unreal Tournament, Deep Space Nine - The Fallen, Max Payne and Myst III Exile look fantastic on this machine.
Maybe the DVD version is better.
The mouse navigation is not good also.
Rating: 
Summary: Schizm DVD release
Review: I've just started to play. As far the game seems to be an excellent Myst-like adventure. Stunning graphic (despite 640x480 resolution), 360 degree view, 4-point 3D sound and good storyline make it a real time-thief. Only thing that really annoys me is the quality of cut-scenes. Acting (wooden indeed) and animations (especially the first one!) should be better.
Rating:
Summary: Schizm DVD
Review: I too would like to pre-order the DVD version. It looks like a wonderful game and I'm anxiously waiting. However, I'm not going to settle for the CD version.
Rating:
Summary: Schizm DVD please.
Review: This game is being released primarily on DVD-ROM. In fact it was MADE for DVD-ROM. The CD-ROM version offered here for pre-order is very scaled down and not equal in quality. I am eagerly awaiting this game to come out...I would love to pre-order the DVD version of this game--if it were offered.
Rating:
Summary: Schizm first impressions
Review: This is going to be a great game! If you enjoyed Myst and Riven, you'll love this adventure. Be impressed by the graphics of the 2 avi files on www.p3int.com, as I did. 360ยบ, 2 characters controlled by you, a great story... this is SCHIZM.
Rating:
Summary: save your money unless you're a masochist
Review: Like many before me, I give mixed reviews because this is both good and bad. The bad outweighs the good overall because the bad is so, well, BAD! I thought the music and graphics were gorgeous. I found the cursor was difficult to use. It took me two or three tries and reinstalls to realise the problem was you needed to swing the cursor left and right to get a response. Bizarre. I found the puzzles had no relation to the environment, and that really put me off. I spent a few hours and solved the first two puzzles by guesswork. That is not what I want the game for; I want to use the old noodle, but not merely guess. It almost seemed random, but since I didn't go through it all, I cannot say for certain if that were the case or not. Overall, any of the Myst games would be preferable.
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