Point-and-click adventures – you either love them or hate them. It’s a slow-paced genre centered around delivering a compelling story and mind-boggling puzzles. One thing is for sure: back in the ’80s and ’90s, the genre thrived thanks to developers like LucasArts and Sierra, bringing us hit after hit. I devoured many of these classics like fresh bread. Games such as King’s Quest, Monkey Island, and Discworld kept me wrecking my brain over their puzzles. Nowadays, the genre has been overshadowed by fast-paced shooters, action games, and sports games. Fortunately, there are still a handful of developers who still give the genre some love. One of these developers is Daedalic Entertainment, perhaps best known for their Deponia series. In addition to developing, they are also involved in publishing smaller indie games. “Life of Delta” is one of their latest releases and one we somehow overlooked until now.
This review of Life of Delta is done on Xbox.
Dystopian world
In “Life of Delta,” you are thrown into a dystopian world where it’s believed that humans are extinct. Mutated animals have taken over the world, and robots are once again kept as slaves. You play as a robot called Delta, who is saved from death by a fellow scientist robot named Joe. Joe patches you up right before he gets arrested and taken to jail. Without a second thought, our little hero goes on a journey to save Joe from his captors.
Throughout your exploration of this dystopian world, you encounter a variety of scenery, from barren wastelands to giant cities. Along your journey, you meet several NPCs, but none of them leave a lasting impression. They are there solely for the purpose of assigning simple tasks or puzzles. The story is negligible, something I could have accepted if the game had offered some thought provoking puzzles. To be honest, it lacks all of this.
Easy puzzles and clunky controls
Puzzles are what you can expect from an adventure game. Talk to an NPC here, pick up an item there to use it elsewhere. To add some variety, there are puzzles like bringing a robot back to life by using a power charger. The goal is to connect positives and negatives through a maze of obstacles. Or a gear puzzle where you have to create a connection of gears to restore power to an ejection seat. None of them are particularly challenging and are more about trial and error than pure logical thinking. Actually, none of the puzzles provide a real challenge.
I’m not the best point & click adventurer, and normally, I’ll get stuck and need to look up a walkthrough to get back on track. But with Life of Delta, I never had any trouble with the puzzles. In the 4 hours I spent in Life of Delta, I was only stuck for about 10 minutes once, and that was because I missed a hotspot.
Control issues
One of my biggest irritations are the controls. Point & click adventures originated on PC, and it really shows in Life of Delta. Pointing at spots have to be smooth, especially during puzzles where you need to click different spots quickly. Although the pointer is fast (too fast for my taste), it is also very unresponsive. Halfway through the game, you reach a section where you have to get a robot out of its house and block its passage back in by dropping some dog food on his stairs so a dog will keep him out. I had to do this repeatedly because every time I wanted to drop the dog food, my cursor missed the spot either because it moved too fast or didn’t register my input.
Another thing that can be annoying is the auto hotspot assigning. Unless you hold ‘A’ on your controller, the item you hold will automatically interact with the nearest hotspot you hover over. This is very irritating, especially because you need to navigate to your inventory again since there is no quick item select in the game.
Sound and vision
The art style of Life of Delta is pretty decent. Backgrounds look good but are very static, as not much is going on in the back. I didn’t like the character models, though. They look okay, but they move as if they were cut right out of one of those old flash games. It’s probably a design choice, but one I didn’t fancy. The soundtrack is also forgettable. The music is repetitive and, at some point, even annoying, especially during the part where you have to help a band through a show using a Guitar Hero-like rhythm section.
Life of Delta is not a bad game, but it’s mediocre at best. The puzzles are easy, and if you are a puzzle veteran, you won’t have any trouble solving them. Too bad the game has some clunky controls, and the soundtrack is nothing special. But if you want something to play between bigger games, then Life of Delta is an option to pick up.
Pros
- Easy to pick up
- Scenery are nicely drawn
Cons
- Character models
- Clunky controls
- Puzzles are too easy
