5/8/2023 0 Comments Death come true xbox![]() With their powers combined, you have a long, uninspiring adventure that we slogged through rather than enjoyed. The beat ’em up stuff is nice in concept, but flat and awkward in execution. The graphic adventure logic is great, but we found the story to be a little meandering and dull. It’s a brawler spliced onto a graphic adventure, yet neither half of the gene pool is quite stable enough to support it. We found ourselves devolving to mashing buttons, mainly because we could juggle enemies on the spot as long as we were in their face and hit them enough.Ī bit like BROK himself, BROK the InvestiGator is a bit of a hybrid. But we couldn’t get on with the fighting, mostly because the controls were so abstractly odd (we didn’t find or use the game’s block during the runtime – but we relied on a dodge-roll that was pulled off with an awkward back and B, away from the enemy), and because there wasn’t much depth to it to begin with. Because of the flatness of the sprites, it felt a little like we were fighting with cardboard cutouts on sticks, which immediately softened everything that happened next. It doesn’t help that the plot rarely goes anywhere, and we regularly had to forcibly remind ourselves of why we were doing what we were doing.Īnd then there’s the combat, which can’t hope to have the impact and depth of a Streets of Rage 4. We found it fascinating that a game that looks like this, with such a wild, varied cast could end up so dreary. It mostly plods along, with slightly too much back and forth between each character, and very little in the way of colour (a friend, Shay, is about the closest that BROK gets to a memorable character over its runtime). We’ve seen enough Peaky Blinders to know that humour and joy doesn’t have to be a core component of a drama to make it engaging, but BROK the InvestiGator also doesn’t have the zip and interest in the dialogue to make it work. Those aren’t topics that are full of freewheeling happiness, and so it proves. ![]() The writers want to poke and prod at class inequality, the hopelessness of being destitute, and the cruelty of autocratic governments. But what surprised us most was how miserable everyone and everything is. On the one hand, we felt like we had played the ‘animal gumshoe’ quite a lot, from Blacksad to Chicken Police, so the glamour wasn’t necessarily there to start with. A far-future society filled with killer crocs, gangs full of mice and robot overlords should have been imaginative and enthralling, but it’s surprisingly dour. It’s not that the house of cards falls down thanks to its other elements it’s more that the house gets boring after a while, and we found ourselves having to forcibly sit down to construct it.Ī lot of the fault rests on the story. It’s everywhere else that we have a problem with BROK the InvestiGator. Seen as a point-and-click adventure, BROK the InvestiGator is both easy to use and superbly constructed. There were very few moments that we had to bring up a walkthrough or use the hint system, and we could always get the vague outline of what we were meant to do. More and more areas open up over the course of BROK the InvestiGator’s rather ridiculous twenty-hour runtime, and the puzzles within them are perfectly logical. How you approach dialogue will often determine how helpful your opposite number is.Īs a pure graphic adventure, BROK works like a bit of a dream. There are people to chat to, with options on a radial menu, so you can Distract, Confront, Charm and more. There are the usual 2D scenes to explore, with items to pick up and slot into your inventory, occasionally using them on one another or on things in the environment. Most of the time, you will be playing BROK the InvestiGator as a graphic adventure. This is, as mentioned, achieved in one of two modes. Even his son, Graff, gets roped in, with you controlling him for large swathes of the game. Before long, BROK is in jail, fighting in sewers, and generally switching between the Dome and the wasteland to clear his name. Needless to say – and film noir fans again will know – that this is a single thread that, once pulled, causes all sorts of other plots to unravel. It’s not the most high profile of cases, but BROK goes along with it. He’s hired by a cop called Sin, who wants to recover his stolen handgun (confessing it to his superiors would mean getting fired, and he’s not doing that). He mostly wants to stay in his room and play on his tablet. ![]() But Graff is a textbook teenager and doesn’t see the point. He’s also desperately trying to make ends meet so that his son, Graff, can pass his citizenship tests and become a Dromer, moving out of the wasteland. ![]() He has partial amnesia about the death of his wife, and carries a fear that he was involved in it in some way. BROK is a private investigator, and – as anyone who watches film noir will tell you – that means he is a troubled soul. ![]()
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