A few years back it would have been near impossible to find a PC point and click style adventure game, as they were a dying breed. With the big 3D graphics boom players somehow lost interest in the genre for some reason. Thankfully we’re currently experiencing a mini resurgence of adventure games and there seems to be some interest in the genre once again. Evil days of Luckless John does follow the latest trends, so it is fully 3D. It isn't content to rest on the achievements of other older adventures and mixes some new elements into the gameplay such as physics, which play a part in puzzles. There are also short driving sections and we even get to fire a gun from a FPS style viewpoint. The game is a comedy adventure rather than one that is deadly serious, so it may not appeal to everyone especially as its hard to get comedy in games right (I could write an entire article about this).

After starting a new game you are shown the intro cinematic. This is handled by the in-game 3D engine and looks fairly decent, which helps to give a feel of what the ingame graphics will look like. The game is set in the 1930's - the time of Gangsters, prohibition, dames, Al Capone and all that comes with it, so the intro is in black and white to fit with the mood and technology of the time. Johnny starts out down on his luck as a bedraggled looking door to door salesman until a mysterious stranger finds him on the floor and informs him that he has inherited a casino from his late uncle Leopold.

Woohoo! A casino doesn't sound very luckless, does it?  Ah, but that's where the previously mentioned mob comes in to the picture. A certain mob boss called Don Macaroni (cheddar cheese anyone?) who already owns every other casino in the country wants yours to complete his set. Macaroni isn't going to play nice to get his grubby paws on it either, so he sends his boys round with their Tommy guns and these baddies prefer to shoot first and not bother asking questions later. To compound matters the police chief is corrupt and in cahoots with the Mafia so you can’t even turn to them for help.  In fact the police even throw you in prison during the start of the game and you have to figure a way out.  Luckily you have a variety of friends who will help you along in your times of trouble.

Interestingly the game doesn't quite start in chronological order, initially breaking up the plot and leaving you wanting to play the game to find out what happened. The actual start of the game is shown as a flashback until you eventually get back to the point you started from. Monkey Island 2 did this back in the day and it helps break the linearity of the experience. More games should experiment with the plot and have more twists and turns as it helps draw you into the ongoing action.

At the start of the game Johnny wakes up in prison with a splitting headache and has to figure out how to get out of there. It took me a while to figure out that you have to annoy the guard lots of times before he will give you some prison rules and you can start to get out of there.  This wasn't a very helpful start to the game as due to the guards limited responses you just think he is repeating himself and nothing is going to happen.  This highlights the fact that the developers should have lavished more care and attention to the start of the game. I found that one of the first puzzles you get to was enough to nearly put me off due to its bad design.  Let me explain:

During the prison flashback, Johnny is barricaded in the casino office trying to find a key to sneak out of another door and escape the thugs outside.  Sounds straight forward, doesn't it? Well the key is locked in a wall safe ........ searching the room will reveal the combination to the safe to open it, which is made up of various numbers scattered around the room that you have to find. There are 3 sets of numbers which make up a birthday of the person who set the combination to the safe.  Unfortunately the numbers the game developers chose means there's quite a bit of trial and error to determine which date to use where, plus it’s not just a matter of clicking the numbers in sequence you have to enter them by moving the dial left and right.  This is very tedious and should have been better thought out.  While Johnny is attempting to open the safe the mob are trying to get into the room so that adds some tension to the proceedings as you aren't sure how long the door will last.  The downside of this is that the mob characters stuck outside the door only have a few lines of dialogue which is repeated over and over which soon grows tiresome.  They should have made the first few puzzles a bit more easy and intuitive to get people into the swing of the game mechanics. 

After that things get better with more detailed and well thought out puzzles which let the game get into its stride.  Pressing the tab key will highlight all the objects that are intractable in that part of the level which saves lots of pointless button mashing near items. It doesn’t sound important, but it saves you a lot of frustration.

Graphics

There isn’t a huge amount of polygons and shaders being thrown around in the game, but things are attractive for the most part and there are no complaints about the in-game art either. There are plenty of NPCs to interact with, around 26 in total. The characters are nicely detailed and designed and time seems to have been taken to make them look right. The game has a wide amount of resolutions to choose from and has some advanced graphical techniques, like self shadowing for the characters which add some nice visual depth. It’s amazing how much nicer things look with accurate shadows. High Dynamic range is also used for light sources which is pretty unique for a standard adventure game. It is worth pointing out that the game has a graphical error with water textures if Adaptive Anti Aliasing is enabled, so make sure you leave that one turned off while playing.

Sound, Music and Voices

Most of the NPC voices sound pretty good which is surprising as in a lot of games most voice-overs are usually done by the work experience guys or the office cleaners or something, judging by the terrible people they often pick.  There isn’t a massive amount of music in the game but it’s livable with and doesn't detract from the game experience. One downside is that the NPC dialogue choices are nonexistent, you just ask them specific things at specific points during the adventure which is pretty limiting.

Location, location, location

There are around 30 different locations: a prison, a junkyard, sewers (complete with crocodiles), factories, a museum, a graveyard, the desert and a fairly smallish town where your Casino is located are just some of the locations in the game.  The levels are decent looking with fairly nice textures used throughout.  There are plenty of objects to interact with so the levels don't seem sparse and empty.

Adventuring in general

The keyboard is the main way to move around although the mouse is used sensibly for the shooting parts of the game. The car driving and shooting sections of the game are fairly simplistic and not too hard. It would be fair to say that these parts of the game seem a bit rushed and unpolished, but at least they break up the adventure portions of the game nicely.

Unlike most adventure games Johnny can jump around. This changes a lot of things, as most games don’t let you jump even over the most trivial things such as a pile of leaves.  Jumping is required with some of the puzzles, probably a first for adventure games. Some of the jumping puzzles can be frustrating as you need to jump right on the edge of some platforms. There are also times you can’t stay on a platform for very long, for example when jumping on a crocodile in the sewer you only have a few seconds before the croc will thrash and roll you into the water where you inevitably die.  There are no lives to lose thankfully; Johnny just gets reset back to the start of that section, free to attempt it again. Annoyingly the game can’t be saved at any time – sometimes it is possible to mess up a physics based puzzle and the only way forward is to load the game from the start of the last scene so you have to replay some bits of the game again. The game has a selectable in-game difficulty and this has a bearing on some of the gameplay elements with more guards patrolling the prison for example. There is also some help if the game notices you are stuck on a particular puzzle for any huge length of time. This can be turned off if you don’t want the game to spoil things for you though.

Language barrier

Some of the subtitles hadn't been translated to English, even ones from very early on in the game. Since the game came out in 2006 in its native Russian the authors had plenty of time to get it translated into perfect English.  Another example of lack of testing is the name of the villain of the game, Don Macaroni. It does sound very Italian, but it’s spelled Makaroni in some parts of the game, so the translation hasn't been checked for spelling errors.  To be fair I am sure it’s not easy to translate a game from Russian to English, so the odd mistake can be forgiven.

Added Extras

There are small hidden packages around levels which will unlock bonus features accessible from the main menu, which is a nice idea and something I would like to see in more games.

Conclusion

On the whole the game is enjoyable, although it has its limitations. It is nice to finally play a PC adventure game where they have added some new gameplay elements and features.  Some of the puzzles can be tricky so perseverance is needed, and unless you resort to a walkthrough or the in-game hints there is plenty of gameplay time to be had.
It should be mentioned that there is a sequel to this game but it hasn't been translated from Russian yet. No doubt if this game sells reasonably well the second game will appear over here at some point as well.