Goin' Downtown

29.05.2008

The skull drones, Jake hears the traffic bustling outside. He really feels like crap. So, nothing new there... Grumpily he turns on his teledoctor. The device asks him in a robot-like voice about his condition. “Just give me my damn pills...”, is all the thing gets to hear from him. Three antidepressants later he goes out, into the jungle of the metropolis. Outside advertising holograms, speeding-by taillights and, something of a change, a woman in a red dress lying on the ground await him. It is going to be a long day...

Jake is a real poor bastard. He has almost no dough, a broken heart, plenty of worries and he has a mysterious death to solve, which nobody wants to get involved in. No wonder, the deceased had a damned low tax status. She is not worth it, as far the big shots are concerned. Jake sees that differently. Fiercely determined to solve this case, Jake starts his own investigations and gets into a few hairy situations. Not that he doesn't know what to do. Adventure-like, Jake collects all sorts of stuff, combines objects and gets entrapped more and more in the dangerous schemes. At any time he can travel quickly and without difficulty via a city map, and apart from that Jake has the possibility to manually change between night and day. Depending on the time of day, you meet different people in different places. With a diary, the righteous policeman keeps track of the completed and forthcoming tasks.

Jake may be a brave guy, but eventually his pessimism becomes too much. Even if our lawman is a real daredevil, he often spouts dull comments and sayings. In addition, most of the time he sounds as if he got up on the wrong side of the bed with one hell of a hangover. The problems and puzzles are actually not too difficult, almost too easy for veterans. In return, you collect four or five objects in the same place and immediately have to combine and apply a whole load of stuff correctly so that the adventure can continue.

Luckily not everyone in futuristic New York is as downtrodden as Jake, and you meet the odd lively character. While most of the known adventures are charming and humorous, they bank on "real" protagonists in ‘Goin' Downtown’. There you have the hyped-up techie, the drug addicted prostitute or the good-natured bartender. Even though the performers bring a lot of self-irony along and sometimes dish out a funny or blunt quip, ‘Goin’ Downtown’ seems more real and grown-up than many of its fellows in the genre. The mainly solid speech output, mixed with the expertly staged New York, is convincing. Despite this, the game never really manages to fascinate the player. Unfortunately this is supported by the rather shallow soundtrack.

Goin' Downtown looks fairly pretty. The cel-shading technique gives futuristic New York a jazzy coat of paint, which is ideally suited to the well-adapted setting. The characters are not particularly detailed; instead the eye is flattered by a some play on light and shadows. The animations, which seem a bit bumpy, are less fun, they take too much time and can't be skipped. Nevertheless, 'Goin' Downtown' does well when we are dealing with the optics, even if Jake does unintentionally fall into the level inventory and vanish after a blow to the back of his head.