Some people play adventure games for a sense of exploration, some for story, and some for thought provoking puzzles. Crystal Key 2 boasts huge, empty areas that aren’t much fun to explore, and not very many characters or much story. It does, however, offer puzzles. Not the sort of out of context, maddening puzzles you find in a lot of adventure games these days, but a good variety of all sorts of puzzles from the straight forward to the clever.
The game begins with you taking the roll of Call, a young man who lives on the planet of Evany. Some amount of time ago a race of aliens were running rampant through the galaxy, conquering people and generally being jerks. They were fought off from most worlds and eventually contained. A generation later those planets that were once conquered and are now free have come under a strange affliction. People find themselves either staring blankly at the sky or spending all day mining materials and putting them on off-world freighters.
Call begins the game mulling over all this, conveniently letting the player in on his home world’s plight. Unfortunately you never really see this plight in action, you just kind of hear about it. As Call is brooding, a young woman bursts through a bright portal, calling out his name and saying that she has been looking for him. Just before she can explain why she needs to talk to him, brutes in armor drag her off and then they all disappear leaving only the machine that generated the portal, her electronic diary, and a crystal key behind. From here Call travels to distant worlds searching for the young woman and a cure for his people.
Crystal Key 2 is ok visually. The backgrounds are all flat textures with character imposed over them, which can work in some areas and looks stunningly awful in others. Some of the architecture is nice in areas, but the game sets itself up to show off the architecture, meaning way too many clicks to move around when you are inside or around a structure. The areas tend to feel faintly surreal but in a very familiar – they seem to be inspired by Myst and other successful adventure games.
The game world is also very vacant. You don’t come across characters to talk to very often, and you usually regret it when you do. The writing and voice acting for the characters ranges from decent to uninspired. The same could be said for the character design as well. The aliens tend to follow the Star Trek convention of being humans with funny faces, or just plain human all around. You just don’t get to see enough of the people anywhere to really care about what happens to any of them.
There are a few novelties in place. Crystal Key II does try to cut down on the walking that takes place away from architecture they want to show off by offering alternate modes of transportation. Once you land on your first world you have a hovercraft to whisk you from place to place, and a jetpack becomes available later on. There also isn’t generally a whole lot of backtracking.
The puzzles are the only reason to even consider picking up this bland, inoffensive, and otherwise boring game. Given that the game clocks in at about 10 hours of game play, and a lot of that is filler space devoted to just getting around and listening to people talk, even the most cleverly set up puzzles are not exactly a compelling reason to rush out and grab the game. Still, there are some nice moments, like when a game you play with a little boy turns out to be a major clue later on down the line.
Crystal Key II is not a horrible game. It won’t kill the fond memories of your childhood or steal your dog. However, it’s not a very good game. There are lots of locales that you almost think you’ve seen before, dialog that is boring but not offensive, and vastly under populated worlds. Even the villains seem bland given how rarely they show up. If you need a short timewaster with some puzzles and don’t mind sitting through some inspired nonsense to get to them, Crystal Key II isn’t a bad choice, but shopping around will no doubt provide you with a better game to suit your needs.
