Open Trail; A Review

[sotrain515]

Review

Well, this one was short but none too sweet: Open Trail by Zetex. Calling this thing a game is vastly overstating its case. I'll try to make this quick.

The graphics were, as the game itself admits, inferior to the original Oregon Trail. The 1970's version. The maps were ugly and repetitive, the portraits were imported horribly and my oxen had no heads!

The sound was bizarre and vaguely off-putting. One or two songs sounded like they were Enya B-sides and the rest were hum-drum western-y ditties. The sound effects were sparse and no attempt was made to normalize the volume levels. Worst sin of all here is that this baby clocked in at a whopping eighty-something megs thanks to its soundtrack. Come on now, that's like 20 Dooms with enough room left over for Lemmings and half a Wolfenstein!

There was no storyline. Oregon Trail didn't have a story either (other than the story of history, ewww) but I need either story or gameplay to keep me interested and unfortunately...

The gameplay was atrocious. The game is basically a Space Bar Masher without the space bar. It's an Arrow Key ...Holder. Arrive in a map, hold down an arrow key until you reach the other end of the map, rinse, repeat.

Okay, that's just a tad disingenuous. Much like in the original Oregon Trail, events are triggered occasionally as you trudge westward. You can break an axle (or twelve), lose a wagon wheel (or twelve), oxen can get sick, Jeffy can eat delicious purple berries, REALLY LOUD thunder storms and appreciably quieter fog banks can delay the party. There are forts (well, a fort and a half really, Laramie wasn't finished). There are river crossings. You can go hunting. Unfortunately, none of these things really seem to have any effect on your progress. You can run out of rations (in fact I went down into negative rations at one point), run out of cattle, sell your wagon, etc. and it doesn't really seem to make any difference. It all boils down to a series of text boxes you have to click through. And after they come and go it's back to just you and your arrow keys, wastin' time.

There was no readme included with this game (though the script file was there, so the "Open" part in the title was delivered on anyway), but it seems to me that what happened here was a case of the author biting off more than he could chew. Too much inspiration and not enough perspiration, if you will. A much better approach would have been to focus on realizing one or two aspects of Oregon Trail, buff those up to a high mirror shine and then move onto another aspect, then another, etc. Limit it to a couple of maps, too. That way, if you get bored with it, at least what you have when you stop will be a working demonstration.

Uh, Don't Download It.