Jack Keane 2: The Fire Within Review

As a first person shooter lover and football fanatic I thought it was about time in indulged in something new! And this came in the form of Jack Keane 2(Excuse the grammatical pun and rhythmic words! What can I say; I’m destined to be a rapper!). All joking aside I decided to have a go at a completely different genre of video game and I’m very glad I did! After skipping the first few cut scene’s to get fired into gameplay and I was introduced to a control system I hadn’t ever used or even seen before! Lovers of the Monkey Island franchise will feel completely at home with this IP. However, the one thing I loved about what the development team done with the game that it was combined the traditional point and click investigative techniques with a RPG idea of the ability to freely move around the levels without having to point and click to move! This feature was by far the most interesting aspect of the game in my opinion! As I progressed through the various missions and a storyline began to develop I began to enjoy the game even more. However, the game failed to immerse me at-all, and at no point during the game did I feel that I was part of the game world which was slightly disappointing to me.

Although I feel that the game benefits from the freedom of movement it also has various cases where this concept has severe downfalls. I do prefer the idea of swerving away from a linear mission set in which the protagonist is filed through in one direction and you always know exactly where to go sometimes it is helpful to give the user some feedback onto how he/she is doing and what they should be looking for. During my time with the game i noticed that whenever i was unaware of what I was supposed to do there was neither guideline nor help in the general direction that I should be going. This led to much frustration in some scenes and i was completely clueless on where I was to travel to and how to achieve some goals. This also led to some trial and error in order to surpass some of the missions which in my opinion isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does slightly hinder the video-game’s build quality if overused

Storyline:

Overall, after close analysis of the game the storyline was very peculiar and reasonably interesting! After playing for around twenty-minutes I wanted to keep playing and see what happened next and this really intrigued me as very few games in recent years have been able to achieve this! Overall the game has a stellar storyline and the characters are very well acted by the voice-actors which provided a good sense of professionalism and realism within the storyline with the main protagonist reminding me of Pirates of the Caribbean-esque character. However, my key problem with the storyline of the game is that there is no proper introduction into the game, I was thrown into the deep end and expected to know exactly what to do which was slightly disappointing. It would have been beneficial to have a full tutorial for the new players of the series.

Graphics:

After playing the game on the highest settings available the game looked fairly decent and had a varied colour palette which was beneficial to the overall atmosphere of the game. For the type of graphics used by the development team on this project it’s fairly difficult to indicate areas for improvement as the only improvement they can really make is based on texture quality which sometimes can make the game too realistic for its setting. One of the major disappointments for me was the graphics options menu. Within the menu there was only one setting to upscale and downscale graphics which is fairly terrible in our modern video-gaming industry. In addition to terrible video settings the game lacked the feature to be able to remap keys to different ones which is also a very bad move by the developer in my opinion.

Overall Conclusion:

In conclusion, Jack Keane 2 is an excellent title to pick up and play and is fun for any gamer. Coming from a FPS lover’s point of view I must admit this game has changed my overall opinion on the point and click adventure titles with its interesting features and ideas! However, its lack of customizability and settings menu’s means it loses a point from me. I feel that these options are essential within a PC title in order to make it a finished game. However, I do admit that the interesting investigation aspects within the game make it really interesting and sometimes rather frustrating! I would wait till the steam sale to pick up this title as I would recommend purchasing it at the lower end of the scale at £5-£10.

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Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.