Late Shift

I've seen people play this one.

 

It's not very good, but it's great to watch good salty playthrough.

It's good; not good like Contradiction, The Shapeshifting Detective and others FMV, but good nonetheless.
Should have a better way of checking every ending aside from resetting the entire story, however.

its a fun movie to watch, but having to rewatch the movie again to make different choices is a little tedious. 

 

worth a try if you've never done anything like this before.

In terms of FMV games I've played recently, I certainly liked this a lot more than The Bunker. I felt that the story was far more engaging with the Late Shift. I guess I like the choice and consequence style of gameplay more than the point-and-click style.

 

You play as Matt Thompson, a college student who works the late shift as a valet/car park attendant. The night appears to be rather quiet, until a robber breaks into the car park, holds you up at gun point and forces you to drive to a house where a robbery is being planned. Unfortunately, the guy who kidnapped you suffers an injury when he broke into the garage and Matt is forced to take his place in the robbery instead. The robbery goes awry and you end up in the crosshairs of a Chinese triad gang, thus beginning the adventure to escape with your life based on the decisions you make.

 

"Gameplay" is fine for what it is; a choice and consequence, FMV style game. Certain choices can lead to entire chapters being locked off until you try again on another play through, so there's at least some consequences for your actions. 

 

The acting is fine, it's kind of interesting to watch Matt's character arc quickly go from an average, innocent college student to a hardened criminal. The music is just kind of throw-away, although I wish they hadn't mixed the music to be so loud and the voices to be so low. I had to drop the music levels to about 60% just to hear what the actors were saying to each other.

 

There are some technical issues I've found with the game. The subtitles and the actors lines don't match up on several occasions, there was one instance where I pushed my luck and managed to get a 50% share in the money for the robbery. The subtitles matched that decision when it played out, but the actor recited the line where it was only 25% (If you don't push your luck). There's also random multi-coloured bars that can flash up on screen momentarily and I get some frame rate slow down and acceleration with a number of scenes, leading to believe that maybe parts of this game weren't rendering correctly. Could simply be a console vs. PC thing.

 

I do wish there was a way to check what choices you've made, what ending you got and even compare your choices globally with other players. I don't really care that I made X number of choices in a play through, when would that ever tell me anything of consequence?

 

Overall, Late Shift is short, fun FMV game that I can recommend if, like me, you've never really played many FMV games. Do try to pick it up on sale, though. I picked it up for $7 CAD, as oppose to $12.49 CAD.

 

Overall rating: Good/Great