Traitors Gate 2 (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.0 stars Mediocre
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 4.0 (2.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Scott Osborne
• Reviewed on: 11/13/2003
• Released on: 11/02/2003
• Originally published on GameSpot: Traitors Gate 2 (PC) Review

The best adventure games let you explore diverse and exotic locales; they let you meet fascinating characters; they let you take part in a gripping story; and they let you solve puzzles that are challenging, but not frustrating, and reward you for solving them. Traitors Gate 2: Cypher does almost none of these things. There's a neat idea buried somewhere in the game of taking an old-school adventure game and throwing in a tiny dash of Tomb Raider and Splinter Cell. Unfortunately, Traitors Gate 2 is almost--literally--unplayable. The puzzles are arbitrary and too hard, the pace is boring, the gameplay is tedious, and the story is forgettable. If that weren't enough, major bugs and general sloppiness also mar the proceedings. In many ways, Traitors Gate 2 is a perfect example of how not to design an adventure game.

In the original Traitors Gate, you had to foil a jewel heist. In Traitors Gate 2, you again play as a mysterious operative named Raven, but this time around, the stakes are much higher: Global security is at risk. Terrorists from an unnamed Middle Eastern country are working with an American defector to develop a computer virus that can re-encrypt secret communications codes, thus crippling militaries and causing mass chaos. Your goal is to sneak into the lab where the virus is being developed. You must then copy the virus and destroy the lab. Conveniently enough, for an adventure game, you'll have to access the lab via an ancient Babylonian temple complex. This sort of old-fashioned pyramid crawl hearkens back to the earliest adventure games, like Scott Adams's Pyramid of Doom (1981).

Now, though, instead of a simple text adventure, you get the benefit of today's 3D technology. You control Raven as you would in a typical third-person action game, by moving him with the arrow keys and looking around with the mouse. Sadly, he can't jump or climb over even the tiniest of obstacles, and you can't remap the keys. Worse still, he frequently gets snagged on objects and sometimes spins about wildly. This is, at best, annoying and, at worst, is a contributor to your character's death as he gets caught up while trying to evade moving traps. The fact that you have to line Raven up perfectly with an object to pick it up or to operate it is equally problematic and can cause you to ignore a useable object that you, at first, might mistake as part of the immovable scenery. Still, getting to freely control a character's movement in a 3D environment at least, theoretically, makes Traitors Gate more immersive than your typical graphical adventure.

There's precious little in the way of interesting story or characters in Traitors Gate 2 to immerse you, though. For almost the entire game, the only character you see is Raven. You just watch the back of his head the whole while, and every great once in a while he'll make a stupid observation, like when he spots a serpent statue and says, "Whoa! Sir Hiss, I presume." So, the game is really all about the puzzles. During the great majority of the game, the puzzles revolve around lame "find the secret button to open the secret passage in the pyramid" dilemmas. Near the end of the game, you get to use a few high-tech gadgets to retrieve the terrorists' virus.

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