Heart of China by Kixx/Dynamix
                        Price œ9.99

                 Reviewed by Julian Gregory

This is a game which originally came out in about 1991 or 1992.

You play the part of Jake Masters, a pilot from the war who is
hired to find and return a rich American's (I think) daughter from
somewhere in China. In order to 'persuade' Jake to assist in the
matter he blows up his sampan. He offers $10,000 for supplies and
$200,000 which reduces by $20,000 a day. However don't take this
too much to heart as, if you succeed, that will be peanuts to your
eventual reward. It does though give a time scale to the game
which is very generous.

The game is set in the 1940/50s and, for the time when it was
produced, looks superb. For a game which comes on 5 disks and not
on CD-ROM the scenery is well worth looking at.

There are several people to have conversations with. You know when
this is possible as the cursor changes to something which looks
like a speech bubble.

A novel aspect of this game, for the time when it was produced, is
that you need to take certain people with you on your travels as
it will be necessary to use their particular skills at different
places.

There are some arcade sections, but you can set the degree of
difficulty before you begin or even avoid them altogether as you
are given a choice at the time.

Because of the way in which the dialogue comes up, by way of a
type of multiple choice, there are very few decisions to be made
and the right route can almost be found by trial and error.
Certainly I finished it relatively easily.

In summary, the game scores visually and although the concept is
sound, for me, the implementation doesn't quite work. Having said
that it is not a bad game and if you can find it at a sensible
price you should have a game to last a little while.

Overall about 60%

@~The solution was in Issue 23.













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