GamersInfo.net

On rare occasions, you can start a game and just know within the first 5 minutes how the game is going to play out. Belief & Betrayal is definitely one of those games, though it is not because it is just another unoriginal bland adventure game. The reason I know how the game is going to turn out is because I have pretty much already read the entire story (and watched the movie) in a book titled The Da Vinci Code.

Belief & Betrayal is an adventure game in the classic adventure style with a story revolving around a church conspiracy. I can appreciate a good conspiracy story, but when that story is basically a shortened version of a best-selling novel with some minor modification to the characters and their relationships, well, I just get turned off. At the start of the game, your uncle is murdered, and you are confronted by a good cop and a corrupt cop. You'll soon realize the situation and have to narrowly escape this bad cop who can swarm the city with other cops who are looking for you. Notice any similarities?

Before you bolt out of the situation, you'll find yourself in your uncle's apartment discovering clues to a powerful religious conspiracy. As you sneak around the city evading the police, you are supposed to be discovering further information about the history and the clues provided. The details and complexity part is kind of glossed over; you get the bullet version of the conspiracy theory. Predictably, you'll meet the old rich guy who knows all about what you are interested in, then the girl will be kidnapped and held hostage. Meanwhile, you will be using your extreme (lack of) intelligence to put one impossible-to-find relic inside the hole that opens a compartment to find another impossible-to-find relic.

Inventory puzzles happen a decent amount in Belief & Betrayal, and just like everything else in the game, you'll receive very, very little feedback about what you are doing. You can be slightly just off in your attempt to make something happen, but from the vocal feedback, you would guess you are not even in the right ballpark. The game also seems to have no real sense of a dialogue tree for characters: Just pick any and all options until you run out, and you'll get by. There is one interesting point Belief & Betrayal kicks in, and it is the introduction of a thought.

If one character has a thought about a topic, they can use that thought with an inventory item or send an e-mail about it to another character. The unfortunate part of this system is that it isn’t really well-designed and is just as limiting as the rest of the game. I often discovered you could accomplish a task in three or four ways, but only one would work; the methods you need to complete your tasks are simply inconsistent and, as you'll discover in the next paragraph, very aggravating.

The puzzles and situations, which should be the heart and soul of any adventure game of this theme, are weak for the most part. Each time you take control of a character (up to three characters you can pick from at a time), you are generally given a basic objective (but sometimes none at all — oops, I guess they forgot). This objective is often very, very quick to accomplish if you know what you need to accomplish it. The problem arises in finding the materials you require. It ends up you spend 90 percent of your time in the dreaded pixel hunt to find the hidden spots (which are often hidden) to examine or interact with.

That doesn't sound too bad, right? I'm not done! So you click on that spot, and you'll get your character to say some phrase that is generic and uninteresting; obviously that spot isn't useful. There are a lot of spots like this, probably outnumbering useful spots 10 to 1 or more. But that spot you just skipped over, it was useful. If you click on it a second time, you'll be able to examine it closer or complete an objective. Sometimes it takes three clicks, and sometimes you have to use the right click to interact with the item. Failing to account for at least four attempts on every ridiculous spot (most of which are never used) will make you miss a lot of items and have you pulling your hair out. Not only do you have to do this once on each spot, but each time you switch characters, the points that were not in use may come into play ... ugh. It is very clear the game has little substance and needs to be stretched out with absolutely boring time-wasting “content.”

I always say that story is a huge part of any adventure game. There is a lot of story in Belief & Betrayal, and even though it tends to be eerily familiar, it still should be a good play through, you'd think. The actuality of it is that the story has been butchered; relationships are hacked up and plot segments rearranged so that they just don't make any sense at all. It constantly feels like the story is trying so hard to imitate other work that it loses focus on what it is.

There also are moments you just want everyone to shut up so you can play again. You will encounter the already mentioned lousy gameplay and then have it followed by exceptionally long spouts of dialogue that rival any other game I've played. That long dialogue is often consisting of little substance. You end up really not wanting to read it; in fact, I played most of the game just skimming the lines and bypassing most of the crap without any problems. I'm not sure about others, but a church conspiracy is interesting to me because of the history, the intelligent puzzles and the possible authenticity of everything. Belief & Betrayal has none of those; it is merely a shell.

The graphics are below average for an adventure game. You'll find many items heavily pixilated and lacking detail. The characters tend to look a little off as well — something I can't put my finger on. On the same hand, the voice acting is just atrocious. The main character is irritating and bland at the same time. Many of the other actors have completely inappropriate inflections and tone when considering the lines they are delivering. The numerous cutscenes seem very budget-oriented as you can see there is very little detail and often very poor animation.

Belief & Betrayal for me was more torture than fun. The pixel-hunting nightmare that leads to highly repetitive and generic sayings that need to be triggered over and over and over is mind-numbingly boring. It is clear that very little thought went into the story and the gameplay. The puzzles and goals are very often just simple single-step goals and then the game cuts to another scene. The puzzles that do exist are not original. The game even gives the name Daniel Brown as an alias to the main character at one point. Coincidence? I wouldn't want anyone to waste his or her time on this game, and I'm sorry I did. Often I'll go back over my review and try to find the positive points to a game, but here they just screwed up every component; even the name sucks! I hate to ruin it for you, but there is no Betrayal! I think they forgot to copy that part.