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Traitor's Gate   Released: 2000 Manufacturer: Dreamcatcher Developer: Dreamcatcher In Brief: Tedious, plotless adventuring supplies no excitement at all.
 This is the game that made me stop playing Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. I'd been playing that one off and on and wasn't thrilled at all, but I kept plugging through. Then I got "Traitor's Gate" and played that for awhile, and I thought, this is very similar in feel and I don't like either one of them! So I decided to give up on both.
In the beginning of "Traitor's Gate" you see an incredibly stiff cut scene in which you learn the game's rather absurd premise. American intelligence has learned that there is a plot to steal England's Royal Jewels, and since we don't want them to know about our intelligence operation we are going to steal the jewels, replace them with trackable duplicates and run down the bad guy. Your mission is, then, to steal the Royal Jewels.
After hiding in a closet until the Tower of London closes, you then have to go get your tool kit, which you have been informed is in the sewer. But you're a really lousy thief, apparently, because you have no way to get into the sewer and have to wander around for awhile until you find something. When you finally get into the sewer you then have to find your way around, which will be great for the five or six people in the world who love mapping mazes but won't do much for the rest of us. Once you have the tools you can wander up the various subway grates and look around.
You have a lot of stuff in this game, and an amazingly awkward way to get at it. There are two groupings of items, one that is considered stuff of yours and the other that is considered stuff you've found. You cycle through items, the more you've found the more annoying that is, and as you can never throw away anything you've picked up you wind up with a lot of stuff. It's not always clear what that stuff is; you can't get a close look at things before or after you pick them up, so there were plenty of items that puzzled me until I happened to use them on something where it because apparent what they were.
Besides the items you have a PDA, and it a good illustration of the design of this game is that every single time you start the game or reload a game you have to login to the PDA. If you've restored a save game you would think you were already logged in, but no, you're not. It's a pointless little irritation in a game full of pointless little irritations. Another one is the fact that by default you save the game as "my save game" and if you want to save it as something else you have to retype the name you want every time, you can't just click on the name to choose it. This is how I discovered that it is possible to save a game under the title "grapple" and under the title "grapple ".
Visually the game is gray and dark, but perhaps this is what the Tower of London is like. The whole thing is there and I'm heard that it's a pretty good likeness. The music is really odd. Suddenly you'll hear about three seconds of an orchestral score and then silence again. This seems to happen pretty much at random, and is the single strangest thing in the game.
This is one of those big, wander around all over the place looking for stuff kind of games. It's very poorly focused, and you'd think as an intelligence agent you'd at least have a map that showed where the jewels were kept. This game requires a lot of patience, as it gives you no story or atmosphere or plan of action. I have read that it is very open ended in terms of structure, which may be a good thing in theory but is aggravating in this case.
At one point the game picked up for me a little when I got into the tower itself. There were a couple of mildly entertaining puzzles that kept me going for a spell. But then I was once again wandering with no idea of what to do and I had just had enough.
To be fair, some of the problem with this game was technical, in that I couldn't see important things because they weren't being properly rendered. Without that I might have gone a little further, but I'm certain I would have given up sooner or later in any event. Traitor's gate is everything I don't want in a game. -- Charles Herold -2000 Glitches:Serious problems with at least one of the two different version of Quicktime this program needs to run (although they don't have both versions on the disk, I think. Anyway, things that were supposed to move; guards, fires, came out as big black blocks.
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