I don’t know why the reviewer is allowed to do such work when he does not recognize humour genre from mystery-murder. I don’t know why he is reviewing a graphic adventure when he does not like dialogues at all. Dialogues are, in this game, part of the puzzles; but maybe he prefers to randomly apply objects from the inventory into objects in the scene, isntead of reading and understanding what all is about. I dont understand why he complains about the simplicity of the interface when it is exactly the same than most modern adventure graphics. Maybe he was expecting to see a radar or crouching-proning-standing position marker? About the sound, I tested both English and Spanish version and it is true that the voices are really badly done into English version, but that is UK Publishers fault and not Spanish developers one. For the voices in Spanish fit perfectly and have famous voices into it. Anyway, another proof of the reviewer ignorance are his complaints about Spanish accent into the UK version voices. OK, sir, I understand you are used to hear “English” German in Medal of Honor, “Russian” English in Modern Warfare, etc. but the truth is that in real life Germand, Russian and Spanish don’t talk in that idiotic way you see in the films. So, I recommend you to buy original versions from Spanish games and then, download the subtitles, so you will get a real Spanish version of it.
I don’t get why, saying that the score is great, you mark it 3/5.
About the difficulty, I agree it was way easier than classic games; but seeing the average quality in terms of plot and difficulty this game would surely deserve an 8.

I recommend this website to stop letting Call of Duty players review adventure games. The only good thing I can say about the guy is he finished the game. But I strongly encourage him to test international famed games like Discworld Noir or the first Gabriel Knight and check the amount of text they contain. If you didn’t like the script it is fine, but then I’d think you have no sense of humour (which is fine by me aswell, but wouldn’t allow you to test humour games, aight?). At last, it is very easy to mark down small companies because they aren’t call “BioWare” (for example) and then give games like Dragon Age, which is a step backwards in RPG world, a 5/5.

I’m glad that there really are people out there playing point-and-click adventure games, especially someone passionate enough to comment so long after a game was released. That said, let’s look at your comments one at a time:

There is some humor in the story, but this game is far from a comedy; somebody tries to kill you in the first five minutes, for heaven’s sake. This is a straight-ahead murder mystery that benefits from the occasional bit of gallows humor, something that these kinds of stories really need.

I’m a big fan of dialogue. In fact, I was playing and enjoying text-based adventure games all the way back to the days of the great Infocom text adventures of the 1990s. But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, and this game has it. Adventure games are supposed to be about exploration, finding items and using them to solve puzzles, thereby advancing the plot. But if I spend more time reading subtitles than I do exploring, boredom sets in quickly. Ask Metal Gear Solid 4 fans what they’d like to see reduced in their favorite game, and most of them would say the (literally) hours of cinematics, no matter how high quality they are.

You misunderstand my interface comment. The simplicity of the interface is a positive thing. Adventure game interfaces can be cluttered with lots of unnecessary things, but this one was excellent. But an interface is more than just inventory screens. Having to page through an entire game’s worth of journal entries to get to the one you want to see is time consuming, especially near the end of a long game. Not being able to change camera perspective wouldn’t be a problem so long as I had unobstructed access to vital objects, but such isn’t the case here when characters you can’t control stand between you and an item. And having subtitles that don’t match the spoken dialogue is just lazy localization. Having a European edition of the game would’ve helped, it’s true, but unfortanately I can only evaluate the game that the publisher sends me.

As for the voice accents, my complaint is that none of the characters has a Spanish accent, which is odd considering where the game takes place. Movies can get away with this (Germans in World War II films were frequently portrayed by British actors who never attempted to affect a German accent), but it shouldn’t have been difficult for a European game designer to find Spanish actors who could speak fluent English for the voiceovers. Maybe the North American publisher had some input on this decision, but it was wrong, whoever made it.

And finally, shooter players can tell when a game is good or bad just as easily as anybody else. The real bottom line is how much fun the game is to play, and Abbey (in the form in which I received it) was just not much fun. And I can assure you, the size of the developer had no bearing on Abbey’s final score; if Dragon Age had sucked, our reviewer would not have hesitated to score it appropriately.