Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1428 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: JoWood
• Released on: 2007-11-23
• Platform: Windows XP

Customer Reviews

Better than the last one.
I can't say this is the best game I've ever played but I think it's a vast improvement on the last Poirot game (Murder on the Orient Express), which I couldn't even bear to finish. At least this time you actually play as a mixture of Poirot and Hastings instead of some random character cooked up by the game designers. Unfortunately Poirot is not voiced by David Suchet this time.
It plays fairly true to the main events of the book, with some alterations, but gives the suspects more depth to their characters. You'll have to solve various problems concerning most of the characters before you can move on with the story, like rescuing oil-slicked birds and finding anniversary presents for forgetful spouses.
The only problems I had with the game were a tendency for characters to apparently vanish when you needed to talk to them, requiring ages spent travelling around the places you think they might be trying to locate them, and the linear fashion of the conversations. By this I mean that the game assumes you talk to the characters in a certain order: if you were meant to talk to Kenneth Marshall and then his daughter but happened to speak to her first, the conversation will run as if you had spoken to him first. It won't affect the game in any way but it is slightly off putting to hear them referencing a conversation you have yet to have.
One of the big advantages it has over the previous game is that you don't have to carry around as much junk without having any idea what it is all for. There are a handful of not very difficult puzzles to solve along with usual evidence collecting. If you happen to get stuck though I wouldn't bother using the hint option as it is almost completely useless. All in all I enjoyed the game, though I got through it rather quickly. I found it much more interesting to play than the others, quite funny in places and an absolute blast if you can get the right ending. Worth playing.

My mum said it was good!
No seriously,I got this for my mum who I got hooked on these type of games after I let her try Broken Sword 1-4,Black Mirror,Secret Files as well as the other two Agatha Christie games,she loved it even though it's got mediocre reviews elsewhere,It has someone else doing a passable impersonation of 'The Belgian Bun'as I call him and Hastings looks like he's recently been resurrected but it's a good yarn,yes it's different to the actual book but that's like making a game of any novel or whodunnit and being surprised it ends the same,really it was Robert Culp/William Shatner/The butler!

Short but promising adventure title
There is a good idea at the heart of this latest entry in The Adventure Company's Agatha Christie PC games series but frustratingly this title never quite lives up to its promise.

Evil Under The Sun is a story that has many of Christie's most enduring elements. Interesting locations, the high society set behaving badly, brushes with the supernatural and Poirot effortlessly piecing together a complex and intriguing mystery with the use of his "little grey cells".

Unfortunately a great and popular story means that much of its target audience will already know the outcome so The Adventure Company fiddle around with the ending and make the emphasis not solving the mystery (although if it is new to you then you are likely to be piecing it together as you go) but rather helping Poirot solve the various tasks he must perform in order to extract information from those around him.

It's a compromise that works for the most part but the result is that the world's greatest detective spends the majority of the game rescuing oil covered birds and hunting down anniversary gifts for his fellow guests. You will, of course, get carried along by the plot but at times you find yourself yearning that rather than determining the order of the questions Poirot asks you could determine their content.

More frustratingly, at times you can find yourself repeatedly moving across the landscape trying to find someone only to find them sitting on a balcony back where you started. Even these time consuming trawls do little to cut back on the feeling that the game is very short. I am sure I will not be the only person to have completed this in an evening.

Evil Under The Sun is however the best title in the series so far. We may miss David Suchet's superb Poirot but the bickering with Hastings is a fun feature whilst the game looks attractive and the voice acting is much more credible than in competitor titles (I'm looking at you, Sherlock Holmes - The Awakened).

I hope that The Adventure Company continue with this series - the games are still far from perfect but in the (repeated) words of its incarnation of Poirot, "We progess!"