Developed by: Cyberflix Published by: THQ Official website Genre: Adventure ESRB: Teen 7 Graphics:....................9/10 Sound:.........................8/10 Documentation:.........8/10 Getting Started:.........8/10 Value:..........................6/10 The Good Press: Good character interactions and action sequences truly bring the great graphics of the game to life. The Bad Press: The puzzles are generally very easy to solve and the great action sequences are far and few between. System Requirements: • M6 • MacOS 7.1 or higher • 24MB RAM • 70MB disk space

This pirate adventure delivers eye-popping visuals, but the puzzles involved and the consequences of players' actions are overly simple.

I've sailed the seven seas searching for savory rums and an exciting pirate game but, sorry to say matey, I'm more content with me rum than me game. Redjack tantalizes the eyes at first, but never really produces the action that it promises. The story begins as young Nicholas Dove faces eviction unless he can come up with some quick cash. The logical next step for Nick is to seek a life of crime on the high seas, of course! After proving himself to the captain and learning how to fight, Nick is ready to join the crew and start plundering. Sounds great right? Well, there is not one battle between two ships in the entire game.

What the game does have is great graphics. It is a mouse-swivel-and-click-game, sort of like Myst, and the images and environment flow seamlessly and still maintain a very fine texture. This is due to the use of Cyberflix's DreamFactory 5.0 technology. The conversation sequences are even more amazing. When another character is nearby you can click on him or her to have a conversation. Once a conversation is initiated, the character's face is superimposed over the surrounding environment. This close-up of the character to whom the player is talking looks absolutely smooth, and the lip movements when these characters speak match their words very well. The problems begin when what is being said is really analyzed.

The player chooses what to say by clicking on one of a number of responses at the bottom of the screen. Depending on what the player says, the reaction of the character being spoken to differs. That's fine, but the game brags on the box that the characters act according to what a player has said to them. I tested this by saying a variety of things to the same people at the same point in the game. Every time the characters would verbally react differently during the conversation, but the linear nature of the story line was never altered by any of my character's actions. This was very disappointing as the box and packaging gave the impression that the game would be more complex and interactive.

The puzzles in the game are as simple as the linear storyline. Most of them can be solved easily by dragging the mouse around the screen and seeing where the grabbing-hand icon appears over an object. Some are more difficult, but even they can be solved with a little hint which is usually available to you if you talk to any of the other characters in the area of the puzzle. The only puzzles that are really difficult are the ones that occur during fighting sequences. My instinct is to use my sword against my opponent when confronted with a battle screen situation, but over half the sword fights in the game are just puzzles posing as sword fights.

The poor combat is really disappointing even though the game's combat system is really cool. A player controls his sword positioning by movement of the mouse and then clicks the mouse button to strike at his opponent. It's a cool system and could be fun for many sword fights but there are only five in the entire game. One of them is practice, two of them are puzzles where swashbuckling skill is irrelevant, and two of them are real fights. Pretty lame; if you've got a good thing, then utilize it.

I truly expected some crazy ship-to-ship melee that ends in boarding and overrunning a wounded enemy vessel. I expected this because, the first time that a player steps onto the pirate vessel, he is able to test out his cannons on floating dummy ships. One would think that it would follow that, later in the game, the player would be able to use the cannons on real ships that were moving toward his ship and firing. I suppose that the designers assumed that the cannon test range was enough, yet I felt that I had had my appetite whetted briefly only to never see it fulfilled.

The cannon scenario is a bit of a metaphor for the entire game. It gets players really excited about what is to come but never really delivers. The game, overall, maintains its excitement level mostly because the player can hardly wait to see what the obvious outcome of his actions are because they will look so cool; especially if those actions are portrayed in one of the many beautiful movie segments of the game. The problem is that the cerebral challenge never really materializes and most of the hand-eye coordination segments are childishly easy to an experienced gamer.

In conclusion, this game is more of an interactive movie than a true RPG action/adventure game. The story and the path to be followed are linear, and the right decisions to keep the path unfolding are generally not that hard to make. Whenever there is an issue with solving a puzzle, the right question to someone nearby should do the trick.

And on a final note, Nick Dove doesn't even get the girl in the end. No matter how I played it out, Nick's love interests remain coy, at best. I thought pirates plundered booty?

Tips:

• Talk to everyone until they repeat themselves or won't talk to you anymore. Then you know you haven't missed an important puzzle hint somewhere.
• If it seems that you can't beat some evil fiend in a straight battle, then you probably can't. It's a puzzle and you need to click on the appropriate item in the battle screen to be successful.