Jade Empire

In important ways excellent, but in too many ways disappointing. I'm giving it a thumbs down, but read on: perhaps the flaws aren't big turn-offs for you.

The world building is quite good. It's a pleasure to play a fantasy game based on Chinese mythology rather than the usual Western elves and dwarves. That said, the smallness of the game world and homogeneity of enemies makes for a cramped, limited experience. For us sticklers it also doesn't help that Chinese names are too often poorly pronounced in English.

The story is also good. It starts fairly slowly, but if you are patient things will get progressively more exciting. Choice does matter in this game and you can generally play as "good" or "evil", resulting in a noticeably different narrative experience.

Relatedly, there is a fairly interesting variety of characters to meet. Unfortunately, too many of them employ stereotypical, stilted Sino-philosophical speech patterns. If this were a Western RPG we would probably see a wider variety of personalities.

That sense of world "crampness" is a serious flaw. This is not really an open world game, but rather a series of levels, most of which are quite linear. The few pseudo-open levels don't offer much choice except for the order in which you complete quests. Generally, level design is boring. There is almost no reward for exploration and nothing new to discover. Whether you go left or go right you will end up in the same place. Not only that, levels are small and there are too many loading screens, even within the same, small area. It seems that mediocre graphics programming really hurt the creative potential of this game. Consider that Outcast was released 6 years before Jade Empire, and yet felt so much more expansive and open.

What is there to do in this linear world? Lots of talking to people, and fighting. The second half of the game feels especially like a series of fights interspersed with cut-scenes. There are no puzzles. There is, however, a bizarre arcade-like mini-game that seems totally out of place. Luckily, it's optional.

The combat system is based on some good ideas, but is ultimately disappointing. You can learn many cool martial arts styles and spend experience points to improve them, but in the end will likely focus on a few that perform well for you. Some are ridiculously overpowered. Combat controls are awful: dodging is frustratingly inaccurate and long-duration attacks trigger too easily, often forcing you into vulnerable situations. (If you are playing with a game controller make sure to enable "Evade Method: Block Button" in the options, otherwise you will have an especially bad time.) Combat even looks boring: less like an exciting martial arts movie and more like a boxing match.

Cut-scenes are frustrating. Some are skippable and some aren't. Some dialogs are skippable and some aren't. The distinction seems arbitrary. But it's extremely annoying when you have a long, unskippable cut-scene before a tough fight. You will have to go through it each time you fail and restart. Is this punishment for having failed? It feels very petty.

There are also bugs. Sometimes you will find yourself locked in a weird, unplayable view angle. A quick reload should fix it.

Finally, note that it can be quite difficult to get the Steam version of this game running on post-Windows-XP systems. Check out the forums for workarounds.