ADAM: The Double Factor Review

Contributed by Unicorn aka J. Sarunski

Genre:
This game is a sequel to the game "Eve Burst Error", so I may repeat here what I said in my review about it's predecessor: This game (as most C's-adventure-games I know) is a visual novel with behaviour like an adventure. It tells a story and leaves the player options to choose, but only if the player makes the according choices does the story continue. There is no way the main character would die, but it is possible and on some occasions likely to get stuck in the storyline.

Story:
Once again, the main characters of "Eve Burst Error" become assigned to different und (not quite) unrelated cases: Kojirou was hired by a secretary as a bodyguard for her boss, Marina has to investigate a series of murders. After all, it's not too difficult to imagine a connection between an ongoing series of murders and a person wanting a bodyguard.

Gameplay:
It's the same as its predecessor: Reading the story, visiting the right places and switching between the characters, when necessary.

Sound:
Music is ok, maybe even a bit better than in Eve: Burst Error. Voice-acting also on the usual good level.

Graphics:
Quality of graphics are comparable to "Eve Burst Error", but this time, the h-scenes were not simply cut out, but remained within the story, making this game an "adult" game. The graphics are mostly (but by far not all) demosaiced. Especially a female audience may be disappointed, because all male parts remain in original mosaic.

Animations:
Less and shorter animations as in "Eve burst error".

User Interface:
Here are the main improvements to "Eve burst error": No more selecting textual options within the text-display, but clicking visible objects within the graphic display and selecting options from context-menus make playing the game more interactive and enjoyable. Particularly, movement between locations is performed by clicking the next location on a map of the city.

My personal opinion:
I played this game before "Eve Burst Error" and I am quite glad about this. Otherwise, I would have been gravely disappointed. The story is quite a bit shorter and the direction the storyline takes is more or less obvious; they would have been even more obvious if I would have played "Eve Burst Error" because I would have probably recognized the "Eves" at first sight. Next, the ending of this game would be very confusing, if the player does not know what an "Eve" is (there is no real explanation of this topic in this game). Even the name of the game is only confusing because the characters the game took its name from appear only for a very short time in the ending (in Hollywood, this move would be called a "red herring", I suppose) and never during the main story. On top of this, the new introduced characters in this game are missing the depth we experienced with the characters in "Eve Burst Error", so I should be even glad about the ones that died in order to never meet them again in coming parts.

Enough of my complaints.
What I liked about this game, were two points:
a) Technically, this game has real improvements. In particular, the user-interface is way above the state of the art and gives the player a good feeling of interactivity.
b) I really did not notice when I played this game the first time, but I met here again a character I already knew from "Love Potion", so here was also a familiar face to meet.

This game is not really bad, after all, but it simply pales in comparison to its predecessor. I simply hope the next part of the "Eve" series will have a better developed story with more surprising twists in the plot (maybe even multiple endings?) that also ties all open threads ("Please, let Mayako-chan wake up!") into a really satisfying end of the "Eve" Series. A really good story combined with the new and terrific engine would be a new masterpiece that would make it easy to simply regard this one as a small mistake or maybe a testcase for the new engine.