Diamon Jones: Amulet of the World Review

Adventure, artifacts, exploration, travelling across the world and stopping evil plots: all of these describe the new adventure game Diamon Jones: Amulet of the World. Take control of the haughty treasure-hunter Diamon Jones on his latest adventure that will take you across ancient Egypt, vast deserts, dense jungles, the mountains of Tibet and even the streets of London as Diamon helps a woman named Mary to restore order to the world.

The story begins with two explorers delving into the depths of an ancient pyramid, searching for an invaluable and accursed treasure, when everything goes wrong. Panicked and running for their lives, only one of these men survives. Troubled by his ordeal and misfortune, this lone explorer inadvertently tells Diamon Jones, a self-profiting explorer, of this tale. Tempted by the vast riches and his own agenda, while attempting to avoid his own debts and conflicts, Diamon decides to hunt for this treasure, only to find himself in a heap more trouble.

Along the way he runs into a seclusive woman named Mary, who is the only member left from her archaeological team. Together, the two acquire the treasure, but soon realize that it had a much greater significance than either of them could have ever imagined. Determined to set things straight, Diamon finds himself aiding Mary and trying to put a stop to the evil plans afoot.

The game is very easy to control, using a simple point-and-click adventure format and a single inventory to keep items for future use. Controls rely primarily on right and left clicks to solve puzzles and move at different speeds, as well as the “I” key to access inventory and the ESC key to pause and access the main menu. The function of clicking on an object automatically conforms to whatever significance that object has (for example, becomes a talking tool when pointed at a person), making gameplay feel very easy and natural, and exceptionally friendly to adapt to.

There is no auto-save feature in this game, so players will have to save manually via the menu. There are ten save slots and the ability to write over any of them at any time. There is also no hint system in place for this game. Subtitles are implemented, but not for cutscenes. There are six primary game areas, each very different from the preceding one.

Playing through this game, I really wanted to give it a high score. All the characters look very unique and original, no two even looking similar. The environments are exceptionally varied and interesting, with their own levels of pace, making them very fun and feeling new even in the second and third hour of gameplay. The gameplay is fun and easy, and the puzzles have a very wide variety. You’d really be stunned at how many different sorts of puzzles you could create for a game that only uses the left and right click mouse buttons.

Puzzles rarely repeat in format, so there’s a very nice sense of originality and creativity. The game even implements accurate accents for characters according to region and origin… well, almost. The game was doing a wonderful job until we started encountering characters with misplaced accents, such as a Tibetan boy who spoke with a very obvious American accent, when everyone else in the village sounded like they were actually from Tibet. Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it, though.

For all the areas in which this game excels in mini-games and adventure, it equally fails in regards to dialogue. When we began to encounter typos in the script and subtitles, at first it was dismissed as a simple overlooked area, but it quickly became apparent that the entire script and text of this game wasn’t even looked at by a single quality assurance agent or tester.

We encountered well over 50 grammatical mistakes and typos in this game, some of them even being incorrectly spoken English (by an English character!). Subtitles and what the characters actually say with their voice are very often misaligned and don’t match up, as often as half of the time. A slight shame became a full-on embarrassment with some of the typos and errors we found, such as "I need somw ething to lock the door" , "All my money were in it," and "She described her future broom-to-be" (broom is supposed to be “groom”).

It is the worst collection of grammatical errors and cut-corners that I’ve seen in a game many, many years. The English in this game is so bad it’s almost funny, but above all, extremely embarrassing. With such obvious lack of quality assurance time, rechecking work, and even that simple little tool called Spellcheck, it’s sad to say it’s really impossible to give this game a high score due to how poorly localized it is.

It truly is a shame, because this game really excels in character design, graphics, environment, and minigame puzzles. Gameplay-wise, this game did a wonderful job, but story and dialogue-wise, due to the poor English, the game really falters. This is a very true example of how when a good game becomes a rushed game and corners are cut, it really loses its touch.