Heart of China - Commodore Amiga

Description

A light-hearted romantic adventure somewhat reminiscent of films such as "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Guide former WWI ace Jake Masters through 1930s Asia as he attemps to rescue Sarah Michelle Gellar lookalike Kate Lomax, the kidnapped daughter of a ruthless American land baron. A fun game with a decent plot, and memorable characters. "Heart of China" is realistic not also because of its setting, which is real China early in the 20th century, but mainly because of its gameplay. It is an adventure which is not based on puzzles (although it surely features more puzzles than "Rise of the Dragon"), but on dialogue choices which advance the story. We have seen many games which merged fantastically tough and complicated puzzles with dialogue-driven gameplay, such as Gabriel Knight or Tex Murphy games, but very few which were ready to give up or at least to weaken the puzzle-solving aspect of an adventure, in order to give free room to realistic experience and to dialogue choices which really matter. "Heart of China" is one of those games. It has puzzles, but they are woven into the body of the game and do not disturb the flow of the story. The dialogue choices are the core of the game, and you must be careful when choosing a dialogue line, because it is quite easy to die in the game (although maybe not as easy as in "Rise of the Dragon"). Graphically, "Heart of China" is brilliant, with even more lucious, beautifully designed backgrounds than "Rise of the Dragon", and faces of real actors nicely filmed and integrated into the game's graphics. And, last but not the least, "Heart of China" is funny. The easy-going hero Lucky is a constant object of jokes from the Chinese, and he surely can joke himself. The game is not less amusing than such classics of laughter as "Simon the Sorcerer" or "Sam and Max Hit The Road". Review: DOS still Rocks! - I played this game until I wore out the floppy disks (that's right, proper floppies) back in the 90s. Since then I've compared my memories of this game to all new game purchases. Definitely a fantastic game if you have a way to play it. Very Indiana Jones in the plot structure and the seagull poop scene remains one of the funniest scenes ever.