Penny Arcade Adventures Mini-Review

So I picked up the Penny Arcade game on launch day and thought it might be something a few of you might be thinking about.  I have a Macbook Pro that I take back and forth to work so I grabbed the Mac client which I believe is identical to the PC version.  There is an Xbox version too but I have not tried it.  I have not finished the game yet but am about 5 hours in and I hear it is between 6 and 8 to complete so I am likely pretty close.

The game has clearly been heavily influenced by JRPG's especially the early Final Fantasy games.  You can expect to spend most of your time in combat which is a party based affair with timers running for each of your three party members.  Each member of your party has a basic attack that takes about 5 seconds to recharge between uses; a special attack that takes about 15 and requires you to forgo your basic attack for a round; and an inventory icon that lets you access items like bandages, buffs, debuffs, and damaging items.  Besides monitoring your three main characters readiness to act you also will gain access to at least 3 secondary characters that you can summon periodically to damage your enemies.  These work a lot like summon materia from some of the Final Fantasy games but again are on timers.  The stronger summons take longer to recharge than the weaker ones.  Finally you also have to keep track of what the enemies are doing as you need to hit the spacebar to block their attacks and minimize damage done to your characters.  It is possible with good timing to cause your character to counterattack which gives you a bonus attack and negates all damage you would have taken from the enemy that round.  I found combat to be pretty tough on my laptop's touchpad mouse but it was easier once I hooked up an external.  I also thought it was tough to do inventory management in combat at first until I memorized where all the items go so I wasn't looking around for something while an enemy attack timer was running out or worse missing a block because I was hunting through items.

The game takes place in four basic locales (so far at least) with your characters returning to their office when they need to move between these areas.  I have spent most of my time so far running around between the two larger areas but somehow there are enough interesting things happening that I have not gotten bored with the small world yet.

There are a lot of pretty funny moments in the game which I won't spoil here but if you find the comic strip to be entertaining you will probably find the game pretty funny too.  Since the game is supposed to be episodic it will be interesting to see if they can keep the humor value up through the end of this one and for future episodes.  One complaint I did have was the cost.  I paid 20 bucks to download Episode One so if I play all four episodes that's 80 bucks.  The other big episodic game series that is going right now is Sam and Max and I played all 12 episodes in both seasons of that as part of my GameTap subscription which was 55 dollars for a year and included a bunch of other game time so I feel like this is kind of expensive for what it is.  I would be happier paying around $12 per episode but then again if you watch for sales you can sometimes get $20 worth of Xbox points for $15 by buying the pre-paid cards through Target or Amazon so maybe that would be an option for some.  This game is certainly worth playing if you are a fan of the series but for me at least I would have liked to get it on sale.