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Review Belief & Betrayal

Review written by ZFXGamer on July 7, 2008 at 01:58 AM

5/10

Another traditional adventure games hit the stores. Jonathan Danter Belief & Betrayal is a church conspiracy point-and-clicker from the developers of Martin Mystere, Artematica. With a 2,5D environment and 3D character models the game should feature stunning graphics and a thrilling plot. Looks like an exciting game but what?s hiding beneath the neat package?

You play the role of Jonathan Danter an upcoming journalist working for the Manhattan Mirror Magazine. You prepare yourself to go on a business trip to Miami, Florida. There you'll have to interview Cardinal Gregorio. However, before you move to Miami you get a call from an inspector of Scotland Yard. Suddenly you have to abort all your plans and you?re escorted by some police officers to London, England. You are told that your Uncle has been murdered. You're surprised because you thought your uncle was already dead for the last 10 years! These events are the start of a very strange adventure across Europe from London to Venice to the Vatican. The story goes all the way back to the time where Judas was paid 30 gold coins, the price for a slave, for betraying Jesus.

The story looks exciting and special but the way it is brought to you is unbelievably bad! The plot is not thrilling but written by a bad writer. An example of this is when you are taken away from your house by Scotland Yard for your own safety. Left overnight in your Uncles apartment without water and electricity! Are you really safer than in your own home or a hotel? Or a puzzle with tomato ketchup and some ancient scriptures ?

What's left of an adventure game when the story is so weak? The puzzle system! Unfortunately the puzzle system is as good as the story. The gameplay becomes really repetitive. When you hit spacebar you can see all the items you can interact with, after that you just need to click them and combine them with other objects. Often even the puzzles become repetitive as you constantly need to solve similar puzzles. Wait don't forget the notebook, sometimes you have to interact with an object and a note to solve a puzzle. In your diary you can look for clues and hints. Somewhere during the game you'll need to play with different characters. You can switch characters when you like and with the communicator tool you can send information from one character to another. Great finally some gameplay diversion!

The interface is plain and easy and should be familiar for adventure fans and easy to adopt for everyone. The environment looks great but the 3D characters are really below expected standards. Besides that I couldn't get the game work on Windows Vista; I experienced a lot of graphical errors and a crash to desktop. On Windows XP it worked fine though. All the dialogues are spoken and in the voice of Danter you can really hear his emotions. But the other characters in the game are just hidden robots I think.

Conclusion

Jonathan Danter Belief and Betrayal is a traditional below average point-and-clicker. With a lousy story and repetitive game play there isn?t much left to enjoy. Don't be fooled by the great package and the stunning movies because what's lying underneath isn't that great. People who watch bad TV-series and don't mind static game play may enjoy this game though. Now where's the uninstall file?

Reviewed by Fenn Segers

ZFXGamer