Title: Schizm II: Chameleon
Genre: Adventure
Strap: Bad karma, karma, karma chameleon.

There appears to be something of a movement in the world of absolutely rubbish adventure games. Like an ancient stone behemoth, motionless for hundreds of years, suddenly raising one creaking tower-high leg and taking a crashing step forward. And then stopping. Probably forever. Those pre-rendered, fixed-point stalwarts appear to have finally abandoned their decrepit ways, and fully embraced this All New 3D Magic. Myst IV was in the third person! And now the sequel to the impressively poor Schizm has made a similarly glacial scrape towards the modern era.

Gone are the static viewpoints! Gone are the, and praise the skies, FMV ‘actors’! LK Avalon have been on a spree, and bought themselves a slice of the Lithtech engine pie. So yes, once more, it’s an attempt to evolve this ghastly, outdated, outmoded form of adventure puzzling into something resembling a first-person shooter. Except without the gratifying shooting.

There’s probably a story in Schizm II - I imagine I missed it while screaming at my ceiling. Perhaps it was during the never-ending exposition-riddled cut-scenes, as our avatar talked complete bollocks with what might have been a stone computer. To tell you the truth I couldn’t hear through my moaning. However, I was made rudely aware that this is still just a series of unexplained, unsatisfying, unoriginal, unpointful puzzles, in which I must, as is so tediously ever the case, click on the switches until some apparent pattern emerges, and something opens somewhere for some reason that not one single atom of my increasingly wearying body could care less about.

The original game was about two people attempting to solve puzzles in order to meet with one another. There was at least a perceived reason for playing. The mad-brained events of this sequel bear nothing in common, having this human screaming out loud in genuine rage that it dared be quite so poor.