People who have read the DVD column of this site know I’m a BIG classic film buff. Traffeut, Kurosawa, Fellini… and of course the venerable Alfred Hitchcock. If anyone has seen his movies, you know exactly why he’s considered a master at his art, the way he sets up suspense and terror is second to none. Heck, Psycho still scares me even 50+ years after it was made! So when Ubi Soft announced they were building an adventure game off of Hitchcock’s films, weaving his movies storylines into a custom story to tie them all together, I could’ve hugged them repeatedly. It was a fantastic idea and had real potential for creating some tight plot and story, the driving force behind adventure games. Unfortunately, now after putting lots of time into this one I’m sure Arxel Tribes should’ve just let this one go… it ends up tarnishing Hitchcock’s fine memory as one of the greatest directors ever made, just by having his name attached to this.

I tried really hard to like this game, to appreciate it at least. With other terrible games I am usually convinced of it after sinking a few hours in, here I tried to reserve judgment to the very end. But to no avail, literally whatever fun could’ve been had here was squashed by gigantic gameplay problems. It’s clunky, the framerate and graphics are horrible and it’s just plain not fun. Sorry Mr. Hitchcock.

From the start of the game, the plot appeared solid. It needed a lot of work with Hitchcock’s master eye at camerawork but the plot was solid and they did manage to catch that “it was a dark and dreary night” vibe. It’s sort of spooky, not bad for an original story. Then we step into the tales of murder and intrigue that comprise the Hitchcock universe. Not every movie has a storyline involved with the game. North by Northwest is notably absent, as are some of Hitchcock’s previous works in England. But for the most part it’s sort of like a Greatest Hits of Hitch, as one by one the lines start to get woven in. This is the only part of the game that really pleased me, probably because it’s so hard to botch such classic storylines and even if you made them a little worse, they’d still be awesome. Once the opening cinema gets over and the game begins, so do the headaches.

When I got the game I was expecting a point and click affair like Myst and The Crystal Key. Instead I was treated to a 3D adventure game ala Monkey Island, which is a particularly hard concept to pull off. This is where The Final Cut falls apart and never recovers. The game’s controls are clunky as hell, the four cardinal directions are used horribly so that when you press right, the guy starts TURNING right, then you press forward to move forward after you turned right. This takes forever, is highly frustrating and not very efficient. I think it would’ve been much easier to go with a point and click interface.

The second most important part of any adventure game like this is the puzzles, and I will admit that The Final Cut has a lot of really good ones. However, aside from the usual “Find the Key!” sort of tripe, the truly original puzzles are all based off of the movie’s storyline, meaning if you are as well versed in Hitchcock as I am it will be a breeze to remember all those original solutions. For the player who’s just starting out though, there might have been a lot of fun to be had solving everything. However, that clunky control comes in and destroys it, over and over again. The control is the biggest culprit here, it ruined the entire game and I can’t believe they didn’t see how annoying it was.

The second most annoying thing with The Final Cut is the graphics. Just like the control, the graphics most definitely do NOT help here; they only keep assisting the control to turn the gameplay into zero. The developers at Arxel Tribe obviously thought a key part of the Hitchcock experience was the camera angles. Fair enough, it’s most definitely true. However, auto-angles are a very, very bad idea and should’ve been shelved right away.
This is where as you walk forward, the camera suddenly swoops right and zooms in, completely disorienting you. Add that to the fact that you need a NSA supercomputer to play this on a decent framerate… I have a reasonable setup (700 MHz, Radeon 64 MB, 384 MB RAM) and I could only get a semi-decent framerate on Low Graphics Quality. Even on the computer downstairs that has 1.3 GHz to its name, I could only run it on Low. I’m not sure what kind of computers Arxel Tribe was testing this game on (if they tested it at all), but it sure wasn’t anything reasonable. It’d be nice if that giant power were used for awesome graphics. This is sadly not true, as the backgrounds are pre-rendered (nicely rendered though), and the animation and models are very jerky, even on High Quality (which you can try, just the framerate will be about .5 FPS). These graphics are bad quite simply.

The sound is probably the best part of the game, with all the classic themes and spooky sound effects complete with awful voice acting. The main voice actors all sound way too full of angst and anger, like growling and chopping their lines will make them sound harder. I think it sounds pretty stupid… maybe in a B-movie game the voices would be hilariously cheesy, but Hitchcock has always had great acting in all his movies so I don’t think that fits. The background music is solid though, so no complaints there.

This game takes reasonably long to beat, but it’s no RPG. Couple that with the outrageous gameplay issues and the graphic filth and you have a game you’ll probably throw 15 minutes into and call it a day. It’s a shame that had to happen, the concept was so strong and had so much promise. In the end I cannot recommend this game to anyone, even the Hitchcock film buffs. For the film buffs especially, it’s important we try and pretend this game never happened and encourage other people to use the same concept, but make a stronger game. A much stronger game.