Guard Duty Reviews

1. The pixel art is beautiful if a bit muddy or weird in perspective at times for the backgrounds. 2. The puzzles aren't confusing and don't have strange solutions. Oftentimes they are a bit too simple I think. 3. The peasant shenanigans in the first act is cute and was probably what I liked the most about the game. I like all their accents and their voice acting. Everything sounds pretty authentic and fitting. 4. Thankfully there are no overly specific or stupid achievements. 5. There is too much pointless dialogue and "lore" dressing up an extremely simple and uninteresting storyline. You can hear backstory of random side characters that are completely pointless. I feel like the game's actual story could have been expanded instead of giving needless background info to these one-note characters. 6. The metal gear solid references were way too heavy handed in the final act of the game. Come up with some of your own ideas...it's way too similar. I especially wasn't fond of the guy with an english accent trying to sound like Snake but still having an english accent come through. I thought that sort of thing only happened with american VA's doing crappy english accents. 7. Sometimes the sound effects are needlessly loud. For example, at the very beginning of the game, there is a guy digging with a shovel in the foreground and the sound of the digging is way too loud, it drowns out normal dialogue. 8. The UI, although you don't have to use it much, has some very strange design choices. For example when you pause, there is a red X in the top right. Looks like it should close the pause overlay and unpause the game, because X at the top of a window in most operating systems closes the window. However it actually tries to exit the game entirely. Despite this being an option in the actual pause menu options already. You have to manually click "Resume" to unpause the game instead. Just a weird choice. Also, when you interact with your items in the first two acts of the game, the item images overlay over the entire background. This can be confusing if the colors clash with the background, since there isn't and opaque background behind the items. Another weird choice. At the end of the game, you have to make a medical solution by mixing colored fluids. You're supposed to mix 2 colors, but there is no indication you can do this, it just asks you to choose the colors to use on the patient. Turns out you just have to choose the two colors, and the system knows you want to mix them out of nowhere. Confusing as heck. 9. The last act has very awkward emotional part between characters that were just introduced like 20 minutes ago, which falls completely flat. The hero of the story is a side character introduced at the start of the last act. Holy moly is the end sudden and the final act awkard. Overall despite the fact I really like the look of the game I can't really recommend it to point and click fans or people who just want to play something new. There are many better point and click games out there with a lot more effort put into their stories. I'd leave this one until you don't have much else to play for point and click fans only.

This is only worth it if you're really desperate for point-n-click adventures. The graphics and animations are good, and the puzzles work out alright. But the characters are dull, the writing never reaches quite reaches clever, the story is boring, and the many pastiches and references are merely there but uninteresting. It's kind of trying to re-create those Simon the Sorceror/Legend of Kyrandia days. But I'm sorry, the writing just doesn't pop. As an adventure game, there's far too much back-tracking, and it never adds anything. It really is only passing through screens you've fully explored before (many of which don't have anything to do inside anyway) to get to where you already know you need to go. All that walking is padding. The flat writing and all the extra walking add up to a slog of a game.