Review written by Mike "Sponge" Rubits

Buy Gilbert Goodmate from Clickgamer

After trying the demo of Gilbert Goodmate, I knew I couldn't wait for a review copy, and shelled out the money almost right away. There's just so much to say about this game, and pretty much all of it is positive. That's one of the great things about Pocket PCs; it's otherwise opened me up to genres or games I would've never played. The adventure genre is one of them. I've dabbled with the Monkey Island series, but could never get into them. However being on a PDA changes the situation slightly. I've noticed that the lack of professional quality games on any PDA has made me more willing to accept games I wouldn't have otherwise touched on a PC or console. Gilbert Goodmate is one of those games that have opened me up to a whole new genre. That little rant aside, onto the review.

Graphics

Simply stunning. Get used to this phrase with Gilbert Goodmate. Nearly every piece of art is of an incredibly high quality, the pinnacle of hand-drawn art on the PocketPC to date, dare I say. The art really heralds back to the days of Monkey Island and other SCUMM games. Having not played these games in a while, the main character Gilbert at first had a resemblance of Guybrush Threepwood.

Speaking of the characters, there are plenty of them in the game, all unique, and none suffer from bad animation or even a half effort at drawing. One-time characters are just as detailed as Gilbert. To offer proof for the detail put in the characters, Gilbert will make all sorts of expressions when he speaks, putting his hand on his waist, rubbing his chin, waving, anything that'd be appropriate for the situation. That combined with the large amount of frames per animation leaves Gilbert acting lifelike. There's even some primitive lip-syncing in there. Personally, from what I've seen so far, I loved Crazy Pete, a guardsman with a cannon paranoid about a Viking invasion.

The scenery is also amazing to look at. Vast mountain backgrounds, a quaint town, and everything in between are encountered in Gilbert Goodmate. You'll find little details scattered about, like the spelling bees flying around in the first part of the game, birds, and so forth. Nothing is sparred in creating the illusion of a vibrant, living world. Everything is bright and colourful; it's clear time was spent making sure the PC version and the PPC ports looked great. Without a doubt, you'll want to show this one off to the friends and family.

Some of the animations just look a bit odd, specifically when Gilbert speaks. It almost looks like they duplicated the sprite, shifted it by a pixel or two, and made a mouth move. I suppose it's a bit hard to animate someone talking from behind, but it might've just looked better him standing still. The scaling algorithm could also use some work. At certain distances, Gilbert becomes somewhat pixellated, with lines disappearing due to an inaccurate scaling, and other such effects.

Sound

Gilbert Goodmate also sets firsts in the sound department. A full soundtrack, and full voice acting! It isn't just a few lines with the developers and their friends either; this is a full production with easily 1000s of lines and conversation trees. The voices themselves are great. Gilbert Goodmate sounds just like you'd imagine, and although some people's lines sound a little forced, like the Princess, Gilbert Goodmate breaks new ground with the sheer amount of voice acting in the game, whether it be port or original production.

There are also tons of music tracks - I've put in easily at least 2 hours, and I don't believe I've heard a repeating track yet. Definitely download the add-on packs if you have the available space; it's worth it. Most of the tracks generally consist of strings and other orchestrated instruments, which may or may not be synthesized, since the quality isn't exactly CD quality.

Another aspect of the sound that stood out was the ambient sounds scattered throughout the game. From bees buzzing, to birds chirping, and sounds in the town, there's always something to hear besides the background music. Gilbert Goodmate is actually the first game so far where I refuse to play without sound and headphones. I'm sure everyone who's read my past reviews knows how hard I tend to be on the sound in games, so this is definitely a high achievement.

Gameplay

Reading the other two sections, I bet you can get a feel of what to expect here. Gilbert Goodmate claims over 40 hours of gameplay, however I think this estimate is off. It's probably a lot longer, especially if you take the time to go through all the conversation trees due to all the humour and wit in the game. It's made me laugh out loud on several occasions. Without giving too much away, there's an enlightening bit on why women need so many shoes, what Gilbert says when you try and force him to talk to biscuits, socks, bees, and other inanimate objects. Some of the game's actions in the interface have small jokes too, for instance, when you click on the town at the beginning of the game, one of the options is to "Attack, conquer, sublugate, enslave, and oppress city of Phungoria." Doing the same to the princess evokes a series of actions, starting from touch, getting progressively involved, all the way up to grope. From the latter, it'd be a correct assumption to make that some of the game's humour is more adult than what we're used to with PocketPC games, so for those who let your kid loose on your PPC for a car-ride might want to check this one out themselves first.

The game itself is just as deep as the graphics and sound. There's a real story evolving, and a good one at that. The protagonist, Gilbert Goodmate, almost always has a witty comeback, which keeps the game feeling alive, and the story moving. Characters change, react, and develop as you try and save your grandfather from his execution. Not since Mafia for the PC have I played a game with a story that has forced me to play to the end just to see how things turn out. Thankfully, the FAQs for the PC version will probably be applicable, for when I inevitably get stuck at some simple puzzle.

Control is simple, although as mentioned below, isn't exactly obvious. The controls basically consist of clicking, clicking or holding, or 2 buttons on the D-Pad. When you click anywhere, a crosshair appears on the screen that shows where you click, however it doesn't go fullspeed. This, combined with the fact that Gilbert may sometime move if you're touchscreen deactivates, and the fact there's little tolerance for misclicked objects may cause the controls to get a bit aggravating until you get used to it. Otherwise, expect item hunting and other puzzle solving that isn't brain-bustingly hard, though still a challenge. Anyone who's played any SCUMM game will feel right at home with Gilbert Goodmate.

There are some port-specific problems with the gameplay, however none of them really detract from the whole experience. Firstly, read the installation text! It tells how to control the game, and perform actions, something that wasn't entirely clear jumping right into the game. There's a readme.txt in the installed folder, however a nice popup box explaining the controls when you start a new game would be beneficial. Loading times are a bit irritating, but they're far acceptable. I would've also liked to see a small menu to load games right from the start, instead of loading the first level, throwing you right into the game, then having to load again to load your save game. There also isn't an installer for the add-on packs, along with no instructions, however it should be fairly obvious what to do with them. It would've been nice if a small instruction document was included, for those who are new to PocketPCs. I can imagine a 90MB file using Activesync's installer would cause more problems than it fixes, so the manual install is necessary. Finally, I encountered more crashes than what I've experienced with other games, so be sure you always have a recent save on hand.

Pros:

• Quality hand-drawn animation

• Full speech and music

• Long, story-driven adventure

Cons:

• Couple minor gameplay problems

• Irritating loading time

Conclusion:

Gilbert Goodmate is simply an awesome game, no matter which way you look at it. While some may complain about the filesize, which is 25MB minimum, with around 150MB after all the add-on packs, the filesize is quite understandable considering the original game had about 1GB of data according to the developer. Gilbert Goodmate has all the strengths of a classic; a few years down the line, I can see this game still being popular. The fact that Z-Logics managed to execute a PC port without sacrificing anything major is a feat in itself, not even taking to account it's an adventure game like this. Claiming over 40 hours of gameplay, you get your money's worth with this one. I'd recommend Gilbert Goodmate to just about any PocketPC gamer, even if you're a big action fan. While I normally think twice when scoring a port of a previous game, Gilbert Goodmate without a doubt deserves a 10 out of 10.

Score-by-score breakdown

Gameplay:  90%
Graphics:  100%
Sound:  100%

Overall:  100%

Please note that the overall score is more than simply an average of the individual ratings.  Many thanks to ZLogics for providing our review copy.

You may wish to search for more reviews of games from ZLogics. Alternatively, you can view all the reviews written by Mike "Sponge" Rubits.