Myst IV: Initial Impressions

I've had my Macintosh copy for about a week now, but Resident Evil was really sucking up all my time. I know I'm an entire game behind as well, but...that's what you get sometimes when you come here. New reviews on games we haven't even played yet.

I'm only just in the initial stage of the game, getting an idea of what's going on in the world of world crafting, and I've already noticed some pretty big steps up since the last iteration.

Killer graphics? Check.
360-degree views? Check.
Fantastic sounds and music? Check.
Live action? Well, here's the first problem.

Ubisoft and Cyan must think gamers always have top of the line rigs. All this new live action (actors, backgrounds, decorations) are really slowing my last iteration g4 down. And I've got a whole 1 GB of RAM in here. Myst III had a very decent amount (for a Myst game) of live action in it before and it was perfectly bearable. Not too much, but enough to show off their new skill. It was novel. Now it completely disrupts the beautiful enviornment at which has always been the Myst signature style. I dread twice as much now remembering a switch 10 screens away than I used to in the older games.

Mouse Physics? Umm...sadly, check.

Myst IV is loaded gorgeous enviornments and tons of new things to push and pull on. But for some reason they've added a physics engine to the pointer. Swing it to the left and you get a rubberband effect as the hand slowing then quickly snaps over to only somewhere close to where you think it should've ended up. Speeding up the in-game mouse settings helps (or slowing it down), but it's still a slight annoyance.

The sounds are still spot on, so that's good. New music tracks help this new Myst game continue that dark, mysterious, intriguing feeling. You definetly feel at home with the speakers turned up and the lights off.

So with just two detractors in this new game, the mouse lag and the graphics card killing animations, Myst IV still looks like a great game to figure out. I just hope I don't get too frustrated and never make it to the end, never even wanting to continue to the last game in the series, Myst V.