Reflections of Life: Equilibrium Collector's Edition

This is [I]Reflections of Life[/I] #2. It's clunky, wonky, inconsistent, and garish, and somehow still a fun game. You'll start by being overwhelmed by the extremely saturated colors and dense graphic design. The UI is frustrating and non-intuitive—I still can't tell which achievements I got and which I didn't. You'll find the point-and-click adventuring obtuse and click-sensitive. And there's a story in there, but good luck taking any of it seriously. Then there are puzzle mini-games, some of which are clever and satisfying, but then others are trivial. Worst, there are some mouse-movement-precision mini-games that every gamer hates. And yet ... this glittering mess somehow coalesces into a nice little adventure across different worlds with some cool puzzles. Sometimes you'll roll your eyes, and sometimes you'll be very annoyed. But, if you enjoy this genre you will find a diamond-in-the-rough here.

9 hours of game play, nothing to complain about there! Colourful and fun, even if some of the mini games led me to (confession!) use the strategy guide. And the rabbit in the bonus game raised a smile! Hidden object scenes were simple, with a few variations, I particularly liked the swapping around between lands in one of them, with some interactive parts that kept it entertaining. The map was helpful, though you need to use initiative instead at times depending on what you had in inventory, so don't necessarily rely on it. All in all I thoroughly enjoyed this game.

The play time was a generous 6 hours which is significant for HOGs. The story was very interesting and the additional chapters kept it going. The art was reasonable for the most part but a few animations were truly awful. The interface was very well designed.

OK, I never leave reviews normally, but with the mostly positive reviews here, I thought I had better leave one for anyone like me. To start, I love HOGs and I have suffered through a number of middling ones and still found some enjoyable game-play in them. This is the first one I have ever played that truly infuriated me, to the point where I uninstalled it as soon as I finished. I really wanted to like it, too! I had played a couple others in the series already and really liked them, but this one was padded out with a ton of poorly-explained, non-intuitive puzzles that took up time and detracted from the story and any sense of urgency. The in-game guide is practically useless for solutions, as well. There were precious few actual HOGs, which is obviously the actual draw to these games. Making a longer game is usually a good thing, but if it is full of something you aren't enjoying, it pulls you out and leaves you frustrated instead of relaxed. So, while this would be a good one for anyone looking to kill 6-9 hours on a variety of puzzle and strategy games, if you're looking for a relaxing story with soothing music and scavenger hunts, you probably should look elsewhere. The scenery is pretty, though, I'll give it that! Unfortunately, the second chapter left me with way too many questions on the premise to really get into it, even if I wasn't already anxious to be done with it by then. Oh, and it crashed a couple times on me, too. Watch out for that!