This is a NO SPOILER review of the new SafeCracker: Unleashed from TheAdventure Company.

Video:

Safecracker contains some richly drawn static backgrounds typical of the Adventure company games. But there is little variation in them and the developers appear to have focused on the puzzles instead of the approach. I hoped.

Navigation
The game really needed a quick travel feature because continually traveling through the same locations across the house and back is tiring and cumbersome. This is I think the biggest drawback to the whole game is the manual movement through rooms that you have already completed to get a piece from one safe and then go back to another safe to use.

Audio
The character voice is a typical snooty British accent and the most annoying of the sound bites is the "It's blocked!" said with a combination of disgust and amazement. Not compeletely fitting I thought but you can get away with only hearing it a few times.

The music does add to the ambiance but after a few hours I just threw some normal music on Winamp and played.

Controls
The game is completely mouse driven with no options for changing any settings aside from the sound. Why couldn't they build in some keyboard support, especially for the puzzles that have numerous keypad pushing activities.

THE MEAT
The puzzles are diverse. Many are nothing new and must be solved in a specific sequence to progress through the game. Some are very new and interesting and I particularly liked the variety of the puzzles overall. My nemesis was the West Corridor on the second floor because I was being obtuse and just didn't see the solution staring me plainly in the face. I was pleasantly surprised to find it took me 6 hours 31 minutes of game time to solve the game, but I was also disappointed. It claims 35 safes to solve, but some simply require finding the keys in the other puzzles. I know there was more than the stated time in the game because I copied some of the puzzles to paper to look them over when not at the computer.

Summary
For a $20 game it is not bad. But it was quick. Normally I like to say a game should be $1 per hour of gameplay. Even with the out of game time I spent on it I would say it totalled probably 12 hours total of active thinking. So I'm rather disappointed with it in the grand scheme of things.

I actually spent several minutes replaying the last piece of the game because I thought it was interesting. But the last puzzle was so easy that I was really disappointed. I really think they dropped the ball on the last room and the last puzzle.

Graphics: 80% - (redundant but nicely drawn)

Audio: 60% - (one song plays over and over. Some voicework is annoying)

Options: 5% - (can only change volume)

Controls: 50% - (mouse only interface, no keyboard shortcuts)

Gameplay: 75% - (nice puzzles, clever mechanisms, poor navigation, too easy I thought)

Total: 55%

Suggestion:
It's not worth $20 so I suggest you wait until it drops into the $5-10 bin at your local video game store.

Tak cau!

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