weakest entry in GA series – Gamebook Adventures: Infinite Universe Review

I had difficulty getting into this story. The plot starts you in an amnesia scenario in which you have no memory of your past, which is a great hook. And then you are thrust into some action. So far this is a great way to hook your reader and start the story with a bang. But this promising pace at the beginning quickly evaporates when you soon find yourself in a series of rooms with excessively long descriptions -- or one big room with many corners to explore and random encounters throughout. The pace has vanished and has been replaced by "maze traversal" and wearying room descriptions. The grammar is jarringly bad, and this happens a bit too often: misplaced commas, incorrect use of adverbs, excessively piled-on prepositional phrases, random changes in tense, and many other amateur writing errors. Case in point: "Roll a dice" is just elementary bad grammar! These errors made the prose clumsy enough that it gave the game a very amateurish feel overall and that detracted significantly from my reading pleasure. This gamebook would benefit from the thorough attention of an editor. I applaud the efforts at improving the game engine, since thus far the GA game engine has been essentially bare bones. The addition of skills, medals, and long-range weapons is a start. But I found these disappointing as well. Having long-range weapons merely means that you have two weapons in your inventory instead of one, and otherwise long-range and short-range combats are *identical* in how they play out, so nothing new has really been added there. The medals are entertaining but otherwise don't impact the plot, so they are essentially pointless. Moreover, the medals actually become a nuisance: I was told at least 4 times that I had acquired a Dodge medal, and since this occurs as a parenthetical remark right in the midst of the text, these constant reminders provide yet another needless distraction from the story. The music is decent. I like the combat music. However the in-game music feels a bit sleepy during the text reading. Or maybe the text itself was sleep-inducing. In reality, it was probably the combination of the two (music plus text) that put me to sleep. The artwork has a certain simplistic effectiveness, and I liked it. In all I would rate this is as one of the weakest entries in the GA series. I appreciate that they made this game expandable through in-game purchases of additional chapters. This allowed me to try it for free and decide not to waste my money on the future chapters. If you're looking for a good sci-fi gamebook for the iPhone, check out Star Breed. Its writing, pacing, game engine, and music are all far superior to this lackluster addition to the GA series.
Review by simkn on Gamebook Adventures: Infinite Universe.