"You can find these good ideas elsewhere, executed better."

Young Merlin is an adventure game that incorporates elements of shooters and puzzlers. It relies heavily on the gameplay formulas mapped out by games like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Ultimately, Young Merlin demonstrates why clever ideas - and even some good gameplay - don't necessarily translate into a good game.

Let's say you start up Young Merlin and take a look at the gameplay. You'd probably be pleasantly surprised: the controls are remarkably simple, and the game explains them to you while you play. You don't need to read the instructions to get started - nor do you even need to speak English. All ''dialog'' in the game is in the form of thought/word bubbles and icons. You rapidly acquire new abilities by finding items scattered around the maps and defeat various bosses/obstacles by using these abilities in different orders. All in all, the goals and obstacles you are presented with are varied and challenging, and the puzzles are satisfying to solve. But the level design (and to a degree, the interface design) get in the way of what could otherwise be nice, fluid game mechanics.

And this is where the trouble starts. The level design is absolutely atrocious, basically amounting to a linear string of paths with an occasional branch off to a separate location. This means that to get from one place to another, you have to spend a lot of time just walking across the screen. And oh - the only place you can get an item that will heal you is at the very beginning, so the further you go in the game, the longer it will take you to get back. (The designers did include a couple new healing locations at the very end, near the boss, which only take about 5 minutes round-trip from the respawn point.) In the same way, the cumbersome item-selection system totally kills the fun of gathering bunches of new and magical items, by forcing you to cycle through those items one by one. Some of these items, of course, can only be used in one place in the entire game, but they still appear to annoy you whilst you dodge monsters.

The weirdest thing about the whole game, though - weird because it is simultaneously enjoyable and incredibly, perversely annoying - is the MINE-CART PUZZLES. You may end up giving up when you hit the second one, or you may find yourself experiencing a masochistic compulsion to try one more time to navigate through the high-speed maze of tracks. You might have to make a map and plot out the bits of track you've explored before you figure out how to get through to the goal.

Now, you might be thinking, ''Ok, these sound like fair complaints, but not very important ones. I mean, I can handle some tough puzzles, and so what if the interface is a little bit inefficient?'' But Young Merlin is so much more than just decent gameplay foiled by annoying levels and interface quirks: it's decent gameplay foiled by bad graphics, worse sound and a lackluster story.

The story is hardly worth mentioning, because it's as generic and meaningless as they come. (Boy meets girl; girl's father rejects boy; boy acquires magical powers with help from wizard; girl, father and wizard are abducted by fairies; boy quests through fairy world to rescue girl, father and wizard.) It's functional, though, and would have come through better had there been better-designed characters acting it out.

Young Merlin, you see, is to character design what gruel is to cooking: the least important parts of a lot of cheap products, mixed into a pale, bland, uninteresting slurry. The main character's defining feature is his gigantic head - otherwise, he's just some weirdo in a tight blue T-shirt and shiny red pants. The love interest is an icon of a girl in a nondescript purple dress; because your character is blonde, she has brown hair instead. This unexciting style of artwork spills over into the rest of the game. The trees look like drawings of trees made in Paint. The stone walls in the dungeons look like drawings of stone walls made in Paint.

To be fair, there are some really well-done background graphics - particularly the fairy world, which successfully creates an atmosphere that is simultaneously cheery and ghoulish. And the animation is smooth and believable. Unfortunately, though, there's nothing good to be said about Young Merlin's sound at all, except that you can turn it off. The music loops endlessly and somehow manages to piss you off without getting in your head. The effects are loud, disjointed and inappropriate, and seem to have been made by a teenager with a cassette recorder. It doesn't help that sounds often play several times close together, and stutter instead of overlapping.

And so, despite all the promising ideas that went into Young Merlin, they're dragged down by substandard implementation, and probably not worth playing in the first place. If you're interested in the gameplay in this disappointment, try a Legend of Zelda game, or maybe Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Or if you want to go way back, pick up Metroid and take another crack at it. Seriously, it's not worth your time to play Young Merlin to witness ideas that have already been used, hidden as they are behind such a thick veneer of uninspired execution.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/03/04