Surface: Reel Life – Review

The top-grossing Surface series has now comes to the fifth installment. The franchise has always been one of our favorites, unfortunately, Reel Life does not live up to its previous successors due to many reasons.

Your sister and your niece, Jane went to see ‘Jungle Hunt’; a film starring Jane’s missing fiancée Andrew Light at the legendary Deja View Cinema without knowing that this movie trip is about to turn upside down. Chaos started when Andrew Light stepped right outside the screen and took Jane with him. You accepted your sister’s request and venture into the Light’s movie world where anything is possible! As with all Surface games, Surface: Reel Life has a supernatural, out-of-this-world storyline. What different is that the story in Reel Life progresses really slowly; although there are twists and turns all the way throughout the game, the cutscenes introducing the events are not very exciting.

Unlike other games from Elephant, the cutscenes in Reel Life are dull and boring. Sometimes the cutscenes are still continuing to roll even if the dialogues have long finished. The characters are extremely static and animate especially slowly; at least they have good voice-overs.

Luckily, this tedious aspect does not come across in the game’s visuals. The visuals in Reel Life are as mind-blowing as expected, particularly in the movie world. The locations are beautifully colored with gorgeous special effects. Nonetheless, since there is not limit to imagination in the film world; we wish the developers would have include more ‘surprise’ factors in the locations and maybe more imaginative designs and decorations.

The overall gameplay in Reel Life is not very creative either. It offers solid fun but the developers surely could have done much more with it. The interactive Hidden Object scenes are simple and only come in standard-list type, puzzles are challenging but nowhere near unique.

For those who are concern, Surface: Reel Life is not a very long game. The game only took us just more than 3 hours to complete; the Bonus Chapter is definitely not necessary and is very mundane, not to mention that it only lasted 40 minutes for us.