Heaven's Hope (PC) Review

Talorel foolishly takes up the challenge to fly too close to Heaven's border and ends up tumbling to Earth, burning his angelic wings in the process, and must first of all retrieve his halo, charge it back up, and then somehow find a way back to Heaven before God finds out. Quite the setting, right? Well, Heaven's Hope takes that holy theme and runs with it, having Talorel escorted by two saintly companions that can offer help from up above when caught in a bind or simply wanting more information on objects interacted with in the humanly realm There is also the matter of needing to fend off a demonic spirit that is intent on keeping Talorel rooted to this earthly plain forevermore…

Squeezed in-between the disgraceful fall and the inevitable flight back heavenwards at the conclusion, is a standard point-and-click fare, complete with easy-to-use inventory for combining items collected or using them with other parts of the surroundings or people, and an array of puzzle types to ensure variety levels remain high throughout. There are the usual fetch quests, a few action-style occurrences (some of which can be skipped following several failed attempts, thankfully, as one later on in particular is of the supremely annoying variety), and plenty of logic-based conundrums where specific sequences of events must be determined in order to progress. A lot of elements do indeed hit the mark.

On the whole, Heaven's Hope is quite the enjoyable adventure, and impressive technically, as well - visually it is pleasing on the eyes, with its bright and colourful characters set against detailed backdrops, the soundtrack is extremely inoffensive (if not particularly outstanding), and the voice actors (bar the lead character with his awkward delivery of lines) are all great quality. However, there are indeed numerous other aspects that just hold it back from reaching that higher level of quality that it clearly strives to attain. Take the fact that nearly everything has to be done in a regimented order, even if the solution is as clear as day; this sort of 'must trigger' sequencing is always highly frustrating because it almost penalises gamers for cracking the code too quickly, forcing a then mundane series of steps to be followed just to move on. More frustratingly, it is actually intermittent here, with a few moments where it looks like some links in the chain can be skipped, only for the game to later on say, "Aha, I see what you're trying to do there…now stop it and follow orders!" Missteps in logic can also be problematic since it would appear that there is one way, and one way alone to achieve an objective, when in reality, with the items at hand, there should certainly be more than one possibility.

Heaven's Hope tries very hard, and succeeds on some levels, at least to the point of keeping the attention of even seasoned point-and-click gamers right until the very end, but the niggles, bugs (that are being fixed quickly by the developer when pointed out), and frustrations make this good, but not good enough to join the mile high club in the genre.