Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine

"Whoa!, it's good"

One day my father came home with a smile in his face, his bag in his left hand, and this game in right hand. I though “Oh my god!, he probably though this was going to be like that ancient masterpiece called Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, but no!, this is probably one of those horrible action/adventure games ala Tom Rider!, and I hate Tomb Rider, what’s more, it has been developed by the same people that made that joke called Vampire: The Masquerade”. But after an hour or so playing I had to admit that I was wrong, this game is good.

This time Indy is looking for the pieces to rebuild the Infernal Machine, some kind of time machine powered by a dark god whose name is Marduk, which was said to be inside the Babel Tower. The people that was building the tower was so afraid of this Marduk that destroyed the Babel Tower, spreading the machine pieces all over the world.
But he isn’t the only one looking form them, there’s also a little fat professor called Gennadi Volodnikov that wants to get his hands over that pieces too, and he has a whole army looking for them. As you see Indy has left the Nazis alone for a while to start kicking new soviet butts. Nice plot as you can see.

The visuals are nice, the environments are quite cool, and there are a lot of different places to visit, nothing like Tomb Rider where you are all the time in the same kind of places.

The music is... well I don’t know really where it is because I haven’t heard anything during the whole game, excepting obviously for the classical Indy theme played at the beginning and sometimes for a few seconds during the adventure.
The voice acting is ok, as well as the sound.

The gameplay is the game’s biggest problem because it’s pretty bad. Fist of all Indy’s movements SUCK, he moves like a robot ( or like he has a snake in his... let’s say in his back ), he also looks like a dumb-ass whether if he’s running, climbing, jumping or shooting his weapons, the combats are a complete mess too because of this. The AI is basically non-existant in the enemies, they are slow and stupid, so they are quite easy to kill. Luckily the bosses are harder and look much better than the regular enemies.
The puzzles are usually easy to solve, which is a good thing because I hate to get stuck all the time in this kind of games.

Overall this game was surprisingly good, it may not be the greatest adventure game ever but it’s MUCH better than any Tomb Rider, play it and you’ll see it, too bad that when the fourth installment of TR was released at the same time TR succeeded while this one failed.

“”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors ( if there’s any ) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry!!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/10/03, Updated 07/10/03