Review: Contact (DS)
Score: 73
OK, listen up - here's the premise. A (mad?) professor crash lands on a strange planet and his ship's energy crystals somehow get scattered across a wide area. It's your job to guide a local lad, Terry, through the different landscapes and scenes, battling local baddies who want the crystals for themselves and solving puzzles. All of this happens on the bottom DS screen, while on the top screen the professor lends a helping hand via his computer screens and teleport technology.
So far so good. The graphics and sound throughout Contact are rather primitive but good gameplay will always win out in the end - won't it?
It's true that there's plenty to get your teeth into here, with literally hundreds of locations to explore, collecting weapons, expertise and (of course) crystals.
But I have to warn you that at heart Contact is a standard RPG (Role Playing Game), with statistics aplenty and with a plethora of spells, jobs, costumes, 'stickers' to change Terry's abilities and the outcome of any fights he gets into. The sheer volume of options, allied with the relatively tiny sprites used in Contacts, mean that playing right through the game is more than a little arduous for thos not used to whiling away the hours in virtual lands.
But, assuming that your eyesight and patience are up to completing Contact, there are upsides to the game. There's a quirky sense of humour in the dialog between you and the professor (and between characters in the game) and the whole dual screen implementation is fairly well done, there's certainly always something interesting happening on your DS, even if you can't quite make out what it is...
Best bought by someone who wants to get into RPGs without getting too dragged down by numbers and who has got good eyesight!