Gameplay Sound    Graphics Value Publisher: MacPlay    Genre: Action Min OS X: Not Supported    CPU: G3 @ 233 MHz    RAM: 64 MB

Heretic II November 22, 2002 | Richard Hallas

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So what can I find that's wrong with it? Not a lot with the game itself, aside from one major problem: it's a bit buggy.

This is a very regrettable aspect, because at one point the bugs actually prevented me from progressing. I mentioned a couple of glitches before, such as times when Corvus got stuck in a staircase or ended up spinning on the spot. These things were annoying but only mildly so, as were the occasional cases where the game would suddenly and unexpectedly quit for no obvious reason. The real problem I found, though, was with saved positions.

For instance, in the second major section of the game, the Andorian Swamps, I found that it was impossible to save my position safely. If I saved and reloaded within one session then I was fine, but if I quit the game, reloaded it later and attempted to go back to my most recent save, the application always crashed and quit. This was absolutely repeatable through the Andorian Swamps, but not elsewhere; very odd. So obviously I had to finish that part of the game in one session and save in the next area, which worked fine.

However, at a later stage in the game, I found a similar bug (perhaps the same one): when moving between levels in a single hub, instead of loading the new level, the game simply crashed out. This time there was no simple solution because it was a linear progression of the game (I had to go that way to continue) and it was a normal level-change rather than a reload of a saved position. (Though it involved a level that I'd visited before, which is why I suspect it to be a different manifestation of the same bug.) So my progress through the game was stopped in a most frustrating way.

There's no mention of any bugs, and no update patch, on MacPlay's Web site, so I must assume that this bug is sufficiently rare not to have been picked up, or perhaps related to something installed on my own system. But I do have a pretty clean installation of Mac OS X 10.2 (recently upgraded to 10.2.2), and I'm pretty sure I don't have anything running that would interfere with saves. So it's an infuriating and disappointing problem. Aside from this apparent instability (and the other problems are in reality pretty infrequent), it's actually a very nice conversion. It works smoothly and looks good, you can choose to play either full-screen or in a window, and you don't need the CD in the drive to play. I was a little disappointed that there wasn't full-screen support for my PowerBook's 1280x854 display (the best full-screen resolution I can use is 1024x768), but that's a fairly minor point.

So, maybe I'm alone in experiencing the save bug. If it weren't for this bug, though, I'd have no hesitation at all in recommending this excellent, fun game. As it is, I just have to caution potential buyers to be prepared for some frustration if they fall foul of it as I did. I just hope that MacPlay will be able to issue an update soon that cures the problem.

	Heretic II
	Publisher: MacPlay

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