Review #819: Gold and Glory - The Road to El Dorado

 No gold and no glory, only pain and misery.

 I used to love this movie, yo! I loved Gold and Glory: The Road to El Dorado so much that I went to the cinema twice. Twice!! While it was a bit of a sleeper hit it did well enough to justify two games: a graphic adventure on PS1 and PC and a platformer on the GBC. I used to own this game on PC and I played the Gameboy version at a friend's house and I remembered both games as decent. Well, this PS1 version is a disaster, so I hope to god that the PC version is free of all its technical issues.

 The game does a pretty mediocre job at retelling the story of the game. It consists of about 8 stages, 2 stages getting out of Spain, 1 stage on Cortez's boat, 2 stages getting to El Dorado, 2 stages escaping the stone Jaguar and final stage inside a water tower. Needless to say, it takes a lot of liberties with how the plot advances, and in this case the plot is framed as Miguel and Tulio retelling their adventures. This is also an excuse to gloss over parts of the movie, like how the entire part with Miguel and Tulio mingling with the natives being glossed over with a few throwaway lines: "They treated us like god. But then the bad guy summoned a giant stone jaguar". Just like that. Considering this is a point-and-click game they really could've made some puzzles out of Miguel and Tulio convincing everyone they are gods. Really, I think the genre fit the license quite decently, and I liked the puzzles that the game has, but I think even more could've been done with the plot. There's no reason as to why the Jaguar escape needs to be so long and divided into two sections, a stage on El Dorado among the natives could've worked really well and build up the narrative even better. The game is fully voiced acted, not by the cast of the movie, which is really neat, and it uses a few mostly-voiceless clips from the movie every now and then.

 Alright, so this is a point-and-click adventure game, which means that you are supposed to move around an environment, searching for items you can use on NPCs or on objects to produce different results and sometimes other items. So, how did they translate a genre that you play with a mouse onto a PS1 game, on an era before Grim Fandango and it's mouseless interface released? Well, they failed miserably. You can move around in a tank-like fashion with the directional pad or with a more 360-degree movement with the analog stick, in theory. In reality both options work like crap. In the end I resorted to a mix of both digital and analog movement in order to try to get through the game, but man, it was hard. Sometimes the analog stick would get stuck moving in one direction even though I had already moved the analog elsewhere (And my sticks work just fine!), while other times the digital pad wouldn't work like it should. It's hard to explain, but trust me, getting ANYWHERE in this game is an exercise in frustration. This also makes the few 'stealth' segments, in which you must crawl, fairly unfun. And it's not just that, sometimes even interacting with object on the ground is hard, because even though it looks as if it's highlighted your character will refuse to interact with it. So just try to fidget around until Miguel and Tulio figure it out.

 And look, while I enjoyed most of the puzzles, others where so boring. For example, on the ship level, you have six keys and you must select the two right keys. I had to restart this level so I was unfortunate enough to discover that the right keys are random. You have to ask a monkey to give you one or two keys, if you ask for three you'll wake up a guard who'll take your keys. Once you have your keys you have to trigger a slow animation in which Tulio goes over handrails to the other side of the wall, now you can try the keys. If any of them doesn't work, you have to go through the handrails again, return the keys that didn't work and take new keys. And every time you ask or return a key you have to sit through the unskippable animations. I swear, I liked most of the puzzles, but every now and then you'll get a poorly designed stinker.

 I mentioned how I had to restart a level, well, let me tell ya, there's a reason why any time you pause the game you can "restart mission", and that's because it's a glitchy mess. The performance on the PS1 is nothing short of tragic, it feels as if the entire game runs at 10 fps all the time. When the game first started and I took my first steps as Tulio I couldn't believe how bad it was. And then there are the glitches. On said Ship level, I tried to use biscuits on a rat. Turns out you have to put the biscuits inside a trap, but trying to use the biscuits on the rat soft-locked the game. I don't know why that happened, because I tried it again after restarting the mission and it didn't get soft-locked. Then, during one of the poor "platforming" sections in which you have to jump on stones over water, Miguel jumped ON the water. So I tried running on water to the end, since I was gonna exploit this glitch, but nothing happened, so I somehow jumped onto a platform but... since I triggered a stone as Miguel, Tulio wouldn't push the stone into the water which meant that any attempt at jumping triggered a conversation with Tulio. I had to restart the mission. There's no excuse as to why such a simple game should run this poorly.

 Believe it or not, I was actually looking forward to playing this game again, because when I was younger I remember having fun with it on PC. But at least this PS1 version is almost unplayable, it runs like hot garbage and controls even worse. The glitches are just the cherry on top.
 1.5 out of 10