A Wise Use of Time

I would put A Wise Use of Time in the middle of the pack as far as the Choice of Games products go. I played it through twice. Too many of my rather divergent choices led to the same result for my liking. In my second play-through, I'd intentionally set myself up as a much greedier and self-absorbed character and yet I ended up the City's Guardian and was told I'd been using my powers during downtime to thwart criminal activity when I really hadn't acted in ways that would make that likely, including stealing a case of money from an armored car! The writing was solid and I did enjoy the game. It had the right number of supporting characters but some of them were rather dull and I didn't feel much rapport for. Barring a nuetral rating, I'm going to recommend this product as it met all my basic criteria/expectations for a CYOA game.

A game from Jim Dattilo, the author of the Zombie Exodus Series. And sure I recognized Dattilo's signature : a really well-written story with clever humor and a lot of little details that don't go forgotten but are refferenced to along the story. There are varitey of choices and the ending differs slightly based upon your choices but the core of the stoy still remains the same. The choices do have a lot of varying and text though and that's a huge plus. Every time everything is well-described and the narration take its time in order to be immersive. The characters are interesting and all have balanced interactions but I do feel like the romantic side stories are lacking depth in Dattilo's work. Don't get me wrong, the little and brief romantic scenes are nice but there's no text to really develop the emotional link between the characters. If you romance someone, ther'es just the same text as if you were friends plus some bonus minor text to describe you move along with them and a brief tender dialogue and that's it. Though there was a similar lack of depth in the romances of Zombie Exodus (especially at the ending where the romance is just refferenced to whereas there could have been a dedicated scene to it), there was still more to romance developpment than here. That same lack of depth can be seen with supporting characters or even the great villain. Thats does'nt really decrease the overall quality of the story but it does leaves you with an impression that there could have been more. The lenght of the story is actually above average but because the narration is immersive and has quality in details I feels like other aspects has been rushed in order to stay in a certain range of words objectives that the author had. Still, Jim Dattilo is a great CYOA author who cares a lot about his community and I just love his works.