[u]Recommendation[/u]: A short and fun but uneven (and possibly not-quite-finished) hidden object game.
[u]Critique[/u]: [u]Greed 2: Forbidden Experiments[/u] has a couple of aspects in which it is better than a lot of other hidden object games: voice acting and object clarity. The vocal performances are decent overall. While the script's lines are very melodramatic, the dialogue was clearly performed by actors whose first language is English. With one notable exception (the game says you're looking for a hazelnut, but what you click on is an acorn), what you're looking for is clear from the description: you don't have vague descriptions like "cloth" that could be any of a dozen different things. Even hints like "compass" (which DOES have multiple meanings) always mean the same thing in this game, so you're not being misled.
But in other respects, this game is less polished than your typical hidden object game. The 3D animation is very crude, and often amounts to just a 3D-modeled object that moves up and down or back and forth without any additional animation.
Very little effort was given to make the textures look right; all of the ground in the game is dry and cracked, even though the game establishes early on that it has been raining continuously.
Sometimes the character models are pretty well-executed, but at other times they are very stiff and jerky.
As is usual with HOGs, items you use disappear immediately, even though you could clearly keep using them later. IN Greed 2, sometimes, you get the [i]exact same items[/i] later in the game. Why did I throw it away when I ended up needing it later?
Weirdly, none of the items you add to your inventory are items that you find in a hidden object puzzle. You find 18 items, say, but what you take from the scene are items 19 and 20, which [i]weren't even on the screen[/i]!
As is more usual than hidden object enthusiasts might like to admit, the plot of this game is bonkers. You are thrown in to the nonsense with almost no introduction, and the end of the game comes very abruptly, summarized by a paragraph of text that explains what happened next.
Sound is extremely uneven in the game, with clear opportunities for effects that are ignored. Glass is smashed several times, and the same stock tinkling of glass is used for a bottle, a window, picking broken panes of glass out of shield, etc. At one point, [spoiler]you use a chainsaw[/spoiler], and there is NO SOUND for that.
This game has two types of item that you are trying to find to complete collections: biohazard tokens, and scraps of the sister's diary. But though the game mentions achievements, no achievements have been implemented: not in Steam, and [i]not even in the game itself[/i].
The net effect is that it [i]feels[/i] like this game ran out of budget, time, or both before it could be really finished, and what they published is only 85-90% complete.
[u]Review[/u]: You play a [u]very young-looking[/u] girl who has a recurring nightmare...which turns out is based on reality. [spoiler]Masked humanoid creatures (they look a bit like SCUBA frogmen but wearing gas masks) kidnapped her twin sister when they were very young. Now that she is an adult (maybe? she looks like she's 16) and her parents have died, the protagonist girl gets a mysterious letter telling her that she has "one final chance to see your sister again." Suddenly remembering her sister, the girl charters a plane and leaves for the destination: a post-apocalyptic nuclear facility. After putting out fires and repairing ancient computers and cooling equipment, the girl infiltrates the facility, meets with a super-chill SCUBA enthusiast and her sister, who knocks her out but does nothing to her. Undeterred, the girl investigates the broken-down, neglected facility, never encountering another one of the divers until the end of the game. She finds her sister, convinces her that she's been brainwashed, and researches the process to create a supernatural ancient elixir to cure her sister of her brainwashing (which also darkens her hair/skin and changes her eye color). The sister refuses to leave without disrupting "their" plans to create "perfect DNA," but she does not help the girl as she figures out how to wreck their experiment...with a chainsaw. The humanoids teleport in, make some bold claims to save face, and then teleport out again. A wall of text describes how the sisters got off the island, made their way home, and tried to live normal lives. The end.[/spoiler]
