Review of Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition – I prefer to call it the made worse edition
Blade Runner is not just a great film with a successor that is at least as good in every respect. It’s also a great game that set the standard for cinematic presentation at the time. Because the sets created by Westwood (that’s right: the inventors of modern real-time strategy) captured the design and atmosphere of the film so skilfully that the world of Rick Deckard, Rachel and Eldon Tyrell was brought to life very convincingly, despite the technical limitations that are clearly recognizable today at the latest .
Smoke rolled by slowly turning fans, huge video walls above glowing neon signs and vehicles hovering between the skyscrapers of an eternally dark city: the game transferred the iconic art design into an interactive adventure that also stayed close to the original in terms of narrative. Deckard doesn’t play the main role here. Familiar characters only make an occasional appearance as Deckard’s co-star Ray McCoy investigates a very different murder case parallel to the film’s plot. The stories only cross each other marginally, but revolve around similar problems and of course the game is also about the question: who is human and who is an artificially created replicant?
You approach the solution in a classic point-and-click adventure by collecting evidence at crime scenes, interrogating suspects, examining photos for hidden clues and finally making the decision as to which truth to believe and which side to support – which is therefore tricky is because all of the major characters are randomly determined at the start of each new game as to which of them is Replicant and which is Human. Since you can also talk to the people in different ways during interviews and in some situations you can decide whether McCoy draws a gun or even shoots, the case always develops differently, which gives the players a pleasant degree of freedom of choice and the story uncertainty known from the film.
Is all this new to you and you finally want to get to know this classic? Then strike calmly. Despite the Enhanced Edition, Blade Runner is clearly showing its age, but it still convinces with its story and the dense atmosphere. Only: It’s best to buy the version available on GOG! It’s the only one that contains the original, which is excellently playable thanks to ScummVM, while the Enhanced Edition actually manages to look worse than the 25-year-old template.
It’s good that today you no longer have to make do with meager 15-second images (that was not much back then), but can enjoy the whole thing in predominantly 60, which is of course pleasant. And I have to admit that the developers of the new edition, apart from the somewhat cumbersome searching through the clues, clues and suspects, even managed very well to transfer the original mouse control, which of course still exists on the PC, to the gamepad.
No wonder: After Shadow Man, Quake, Turok and many other implementations, Nightdive Studios is very familiar with the restoration of classics … at least that’s what you would think. Only to find that many of the backdrops were so drastically relieved of details when extrapolating the textures and effects that some shots look extremely washed out. Take a look at the following comparison and tell me exactly what was “Enhanced” about it:
In some places it’s just this well-known effect that textures in a low resolution seem to show more detail than they actually do. In other places, however, it seems as if Nightdive had placed massive panes of frosted glass in the room. It’s not fun to watch. It largely destroys the atmosphere that is so important for Blade Runner. Because some of the effects also seem flawed, for example in front of Howie Lee’s sushi snack bar, where the figures are not wrapped in thick smoke, but are placed in front of them as brightly colored cardboard cutouts.
Incidentally, there is also a phenomenon that people are arguing about, but the effect of which is felt by many people to be clearly disadvantageous: the soap opera effect, when films and series are not shown at their actual rate of usually 24 frames per second, but at 60 or more. What is seen then no longer appears “big” and cinematic, but like a cheap amateur recording. It is logical that this is pure habit – but the effect is taking hold. And as much as I almost always prefer the higher frame rate in games, here the soap opera feel disenchants some of the movie scenes and transitions.
Incidentally, the fact that some tracking shots are still displayed with remarkably few images is not only less bad for that reason. I suspect that the environment where this occurs is not made up of three-dimensional objects, but rather pre-calculated images, and the relevant transitions are just a few such images lined up like a slide show – something like that couldn’t be smoother without a complete rebuild of the set represent.
Such exceptions are tolerable. And that also applies to the fact that due to the technology used at the time (the figures sometimes consist of hundreds of cross-sectional slices placed on top of each other), all of the characters are still very coarse-pixelated contemporaries today. However, there are reports that the console versions not only run at a low framerate occasionally, but appear that way all the time. Now I’ve only played the PC version, but you should probably keep that in mind until Nightdive hopefully fixes it at some point.
It doesn’t stop with the graphic deteriorating improvement, but continues where the shooting range either doesn’t work at all or McCoy just doesn’t shoot at a targeted target. You can also skip German voice output, although it can be selected in the main menu. Oh, and by the way: the new menus look absolutely awful, like placeholders cobbled together in a matter of minutes. In any case, they have lost nothing in a visually strong game. Even in terms of color, the light blue looks like a foreign body and I seriously wonder what got Nightdive there.
But further on in the text: The Designer’s Cut that can be selected in the original, with which some of the monologues spoken about the events are omitted, similar to the Director’s Cut of the film, is simply not available in the Enhanced Edition. You can also no longer change at any time whether McCoy comes across as polite, normal, grumpy or unpredictable in conversations – you now have to decide on one of these before starting a new game. I usually choose the fifth option anyway, where the player has a free choice about what is said in each dialogue.
Last but not least, searching through photos for additional clues in the new edition is unnecessarily annoying because it now takes more than twice as long to focus each magnification. Console players are also annoyed that they are not allowed to move their alter ego freely, but McCoy only starts running when you click on one of the interaction points.
Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition Review Verdict
Unfortunately, that’s a whole lot of trouble that Nightdive has poured into here. There can be no question of an all-round successful new edition – on the contrary: Important parts were not “enhanced”, but straight down worsened. Especially the once dirty, now overly slick and at times shockingly lacking in detail backdrops do the glorious classic a disservice. There are also technical problems and the fact that the implementation is missing some content or options. It’s not a total failure. Despite the annoying drawbacks, Blade Runner convinces as an atmospheric science fiction thriller with strong content. If the developers eliminate a few critical errors, the Enhanced Edition is at least easily worth the ten euros. Just wait until the time comes to buy. Or get the GOG version right away and play the much more coherent original!
Reference-www.eurogamer.de
