Alimardan Meets Merlin Reviews

Worst crap I ever played!

Either you don't know what your next step is, or you read the diary and instead of clues get the solution Lots of text even if you click something irrelevant Didn't get the story

This may be the WORST point and click adventure game I've ever played! Don't make the same mistake I did, DO NOT buy this awful game!

If you enjoyed Alimardan's Mischief (the first game in this Alimardan series) you will probably not enjoy this sequel. The graphics though newer and in some ways cleaner are just not as nice. Alimarden looks like a lima bean with legs arms and a big round head. The character designs in the first game were not this bad and had a sort of childish charm to them but here it's just purposely as weird as it can be for some characters. Alimardan and the "Fair Lady" on whose posterior rests a potted plant are prime examples of this odd choice in character design. The backgrounds are actually not bad but they also don't have anything particularly memorable or interesting. The voices are all in Persian/Farsi like the first game but it feels like it's really out of place for all of medieval Europe to be able to understand and fluently speak Persian/Farsi. It's not like the mention any magical things that make communication possible. The voice acting I thought was a little better than the first game but being that it's in Persian/Farsi and I don't speak it or understand it, that makes it hard to pick up on the actual quality of the voice actors performances. The background sounds are kind of annoying sounding and the music is almost inaudible (I didn't try adjusting anything with the sound) but also felt very out of place since they sounded like more modern Persian music which doesn't fit well into the Medieval Europe setting. At least they could have chosen to use classical Persian music which would perhaps be closer to the time period. The story was pretty weak. The writing wasn't that great even though the translations seemed better than the first game. The plot was really weird and hardly made sense and was so simplistic it barely keeps your attention. The writer's apparently thought it would be funny to make a lot of references to American movies... I didn't find any of the references they made funny. They also make a point to mention other games and that they are available on Steam. Alimardan breaks the fourth wall several times and none of those times are entertaining enough to have made it worth breaking. I don't mind when developers make references to other games and movies and such but the references felt more like an advertisement or like people saying we've watched this movie. It didn't feel like a natural flow for the character to be talking about these things. The game is a point & click adventure even more so than its predecessor but, unfortunately the game play is very different than the first game. To their credit the developers added in more minigames and puzzle solving. However, to their detriment those minigames and puzzles were pretty bad. They are easy enough in concept but or example on of the first minigames was basically a hidden picture find where you have to locate all the parts of a saddle. I found all but one. Even using the hints which highlight hotspots and clicking on every hotspot I could not find the missing piece... they don't necessarily even like the picture of what you're finding. I had 3 people with younger eyes looking with me and almost and hour later we still couldn't find it. I started randomly clicking on my touchscreen in rows up and down moving my finder about 1 cm at a time. Eventually, I found the missing piece but I still don't know exactly where it was hiding. Other examples of bad mini gaming are that they give you the answers instead of clues in your book. Othertimes, like the hidden door lock, you pull a piece of paper out of the trash with the solution but you can't interact with that paper and look at it after you already seen it the initial time. It took me quite quite a while of trying to squint at the paper in the inventory to try and figure out the symbols before I gave up and started looking at other items in my inventory. I happened to open my journal and found a copy had been written in the journal the whole time... why did we keep the paper then? It should disappear from the inventory or you should be able to interact with it. Though Alimardan is from Iran we see almost nothing of Iranian people, culture, imagery, or setting. Which I found really disappointing. I mean there's tons of European games imposing their ideals into Middle Eastern themed games I was hoping this might provide a little bit of the opposite but it doesn't. It's a poor retelling of a Merlin/King Arthur story (which normally I love anyways) but fails to capture any of the charm of the first game or the magic of Arthurian tales. My total game time was about 4 hours but 2 of that was probably wasted on minigame and hotspot issues. About 2 hours of actual playtime otherwise. Even if I take it as 4 hours of gameplay (at least 2 of which was not entertaining and enjoyable) the game comes out to at best about $1.50/hr of game play. That's more than I like and especially for a game I didn't find very enjoyable. If you really want to play it at least wait for a deep discount. It routinely goes on sale for about $1-$1.50. I really wanted to like this and I like the idea of supporting game developers in the Middle East especially when they are producing content that really represents Middle Eastern cultures which I though was a good aspect of the first game but this game doesn't have any of that and just doesn't offer enough to earn a recommendation from me.