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80 Days could have been a great take on a classic story if more time and care would have been put into it, but as it currently stands it's very hard to recommend the game to anyone.

For adventure gamers looking for a thrilling PC title inspired by Jules Verne's most well-known adventure novel, Frogwares 80 Days sounds like the perfect concept. Unfortunately literary perfection can't save what is a great idea from a host of tedious puzzles, dull and humorless jokes, and some extremely buggy gameplay.



As many people already know the novel Around the World In 80 Days revolves around the adventure of Phileas Fogg, a man of wealth living in Victorian-era London, make a bet that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. It's a classic adventure story brimming with charm, Indian princesses, mistaken identities, and fantasy steam driven transports. Rather than retelling the original story 80 Days uses the novel as a guide for an new adventure story that follows Oliver, a Englishman who takes the challenge of traveling around the world in 80 days to recover the lost patents for four of his Uncle's inventions.



Along the way you will visit various locations including Cairo, Bombay, Yokohama, San Francisco, and London. During your travels you must make use of numerous modes of transportation. While riding elephants, magic carpets, boats and various other vehicles sounds like the best part of the game it's actually one of the most frustrating. Since the games collision detection, controls, and camera are horrible the fun is instantly crushed once you try to turn a corner only to hit a tree and bounce backwards while being turn completely around or come to a dead stop near a person or a corner of a building.



Some of the most common things that you see in every video game are also plagued with problems. Walking is mind-numbingly slow and choppy and while you do have the option to run it's not much faster than what your normal walking speed would be in any other game in the genre. Also the staple of the gameplay, puzzles, are tedious and predictable. While some puzzles are fun and unique some are just pointless and leave you scratching your head pondering why that was even necessary.



Graphically 80 Days is a pretty solid and good looking game. The character models have a nice and clean look to them with realistic proportions and a high level of detail but NPC models are recycled throughout the game and all of the animations have a stiff mechanical look. The environments feature an abundance of nice, sharp textures, but overall they take on a flat look and there are some distracting level details that lead to some problems.



Another downside to 80 Days is the sound and dialogue. NPC voice acting is loud and annoying and the actual lines seem like they have been badly translated from another language as it is riddled with awkward and odd phrasing. The actual game soundtrack just leaves us confused. While the bulk of the game seems to lean toward a turn-of-the-century feel, the soundtrack contains a mix of weird disco tunes, a rock instrumental tune and a techno track.



Even with the budget price of $20, 80 Days is hard to recommend to anyone. Fans of the novel will be offended by the liberties that the game has taken with the original story or just be completely uninterested with playing through the adventure. While genre vets will find it difficult to wade through the technical problems just to solve some puzzles that they have worked on in countless other titles. 80 Days could have been much better if the bugs and gameplay would have been fine tuned and expanded upon.

Review by Christopher Burkett.