"Few games are worse than this one, and those games cost less"

I'm not really sure where to start with Watchmaker, because it gets a lot wrong. The story which could be exciting or the aweful voice overs. Instead lets start off with what Watchmaker does right.

The story involves a man named Boone and a girl named Victoria who are hired to investigate a castle is Austria. Their's been a theft and if our two hero's do not find what they are supposed to find by midnight the world comes to and end when supernatural ''things'' will take over the world. To the Watchmakers credit, the story is actually pretty good, and the Graphics are actually decent. (In other words, I've seen worse). I was impressed with the graphics options. Being an adventure game, I was expecting just an option for ''shadows'', but the game goes further and offers transform and lighting as well as some other DirectX8 effects. Not bad for a game that recommends a 16meg video card.

Of coarse the game gets a lot more wrong. The sounds are horrible! Boone(the guy) sound like an ogre.. and looks like one to boot. The girl Victoria looks like she has jaw problems. To be fair, Victoria's voice acting is at least respectable. Of coarse their's one huge flaw that outdoes the dismal voice acting.. Camra and Controls. The game allows you to play from a first person or 3rd person point of view. Both views are not suited for this game. A user controlled camra is a must in this type of game. The actual controls are horrible themselves. For instance, their comes a time to investiagte the bathroom, I looked at the sink, hit the key that allowed me to look at my inventory, went back to the game and saw that my character was now standing inside the sink! huh? This forced me to exit the game and restart. Unfortuantly, this is a common occurance in Watchmaker.

I ran the game on a ATi Radeon 9700PRO, 2600+AMD, 1gig DDR400. You could easily run this game on a GeForce2mx, 500mhz processer and 128meg of ram. So to Watchmakers credit the game does not tax the computer all that much.

What we have here is a game that had the potential to be a great game, but because of it's execution ended up a lot of marbles short. Certinaly not worth the 39.99 price tag. If you can put up with bad voice acting and off the wall controls, you will find decent graphics and a intresting storyline.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/25/03, Updated 04/25/03