IFComp08 Review: wHen mAchines aTtack
It wants to be "A Technological Horror." It says so right there in the subtitle. And, well, I did a lot of cringing, but not at anything that was intended to be scary. The NPCs were supposed to be turning into robots or something, but the writing was so stilted that it was hard to tell that this was the case.
In a sense, I can't complain too much. The writing is awful, yes, but it's awful in the "needs an editor" sense. It's much closer to stereotypical slush than your traditional Terrible IF Game - flabby, overwrought, unintentially hilarious mangled similes, completely unbelievable characters. This, from a hapless victim's diary, jumped out at me:
I don't know whether I should alert the police and run away to another country, or whether I should go along with their evil bidding
Nobody ever phrases an ethical dilemma like this, even to themselves. And if for some reason they did, they would not pick the "Booyah! Evil bidding ahoy!", which, without exception, everyone in the game does.
The map is far too large, and the parsing is finicky and hopeless. In fact, the walkthrough itself flails around trying to get the phrasing right and failing a few times. It also doubles back because they forgot something, or walks into walls.
The second or third time you have to enter WAIT a vast number of times to step through an enormous cutscene, he even apologizes.
If I may be so bold: IF YOU HAVE TO APOLOGIZE FOR IT IN YOUR WALKTHROUGH, MAYBE YOU OUGHT TO REDESIGN IT. You might want to redesign the bits you can't get right in the walkthrough, too.
I also got some [*** PROGRAMMING ERROR ***] replies while working off the walkthrough towards the end. That's also a not-very-subtle sign that your magnum opus needs more love.
This is bad to the point of unplayable, but almost all the errors are of the form "needs editing and ruthless trimming." It took a good three hours to get through the whole game, but I strongly suspect that if it gets the editing it so desperately needs, it would come in at right about the two hour mark.