Fenimore Fillmore's Revenge (PC) review "Missing the mark in everything it tries to achieve, Fenimore Fillmore's Revenge is a catastrophe of an adventure game. Thoughtlessly designed and amateurishly crafted, it quickly descends into a pile of pointless gibberish and unfinished ideas. Fortunately, it's so insignificant that it's not worth getting upset about. If you're stupid enough to play it, make sure you disconnect your speakers first."

Voice acting this bad makes my ears fall out.

Actually, that's a lie. They're still very much intact, cauliflower-shaped as ever. I wish it were true, though. I'd take severe aural disability over this any day. Insulting? Perhaps. But then maybe it's also a bit offensive to assume you can fluke your way through a whole game putting on American accents when you're quite obviously British. Especially when the dialogue is as cringingly awful and stereotyped as this.

It's terrible. No, I don't think that quite sums it up. This isn't "Patrick Stewart phoning in his lines for Oblivion" terrible. It's something far, far worse. "Acting" is really pushing it. There's no evidence of any quality at all. If I were to hazard an outlandish guess, I'd say the team in charge of translating the game from German did the placeholders, then forgot to get anyone professional in to re-record the voices. Maybe that's a bit presumptuous, but it's about the kindest conclusion I could draw.

Even more excruciating than the preposterous accents and complete lack of enthusiasm is an apparent distaste for context. The intonation is all wrong. Characters don't have conversations; they read somewhat related lines with absolutely no regard for the subtleties of phonetics. Questions become statements. Shy requests become angry demands. Any attempts at humour fall disastrously flat as a result, though it's difficult to pick out anything in the script that could be conceived as a joke.

Maybe I just misunderstood the press release. I assumed this was supposed to be a comedy game, but then the word "humouristic" doesn't appear in any dictionary I've ever seen. This is the thing with Fenimore Fillmore's Revenge. It's such a shoddy package, in every tangible sense, that even the peripherals are embarrassing. That it's not some deeply ironic joke is the saddest fact of all.

This sequel to a couple of other adventure games you won't have heard of drops you in the middle of a wild-west conflict so inadequately explained that it's difficult to care about. Someone dies, your girlfriend gets kidnapped, and then there's an old bloke looking after you for some reason. The game might have explained that bit, actually, but somewhere in between the frequent animation glitches and careless volume fluctuation, I switched off. My attention span is usually fine. Revenge destroyed it.

Puzzles are light and manageable, but obscured by the game's lack of feedback. You can be approaching a task in exactly the right way, but not realise it until you've done the other three things required in a given situation. When an early puzzle seems to revolve around diluting a bottle of whisky, drinking some, then shooting a glass, you'd be forgiven for assuming your initial idea was wrong. It's not. It's absolutely the right thing to do. But the cut-scene still tells you the whisky's too strong, until you've completed the bit about the sun being in your eyes as well.

Inexplicably, combat exists. It's awful. You aim the crosshair at a target, and the bullet misses by a mile. You aim slightly off-centre, and score a direct hit. If functional, it would have seemed awkward and out of place. In this state, it's criminal.

Missing the mark in everything it tries to achieve, Fenimore Fillmore's Revenge is a catastrophe of an adventure game. Thoughtlessly designed and amateurishly crafted, it quickly descends into a pile of pointless gibberish and unfinished ideas. Fortunately, it's so insignificant that it's not worth getting upset about. If you're stupid enough to play it, make sure you disconnect your speakers first.

Freelance review by Lewis Denby (March 16, 2009) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.