Adventure Police Quest III: The Kindred 1

Sonny Bonds, the hero of Lytton, is back! Promoted to sergeant, and now married to his former highschool sweetheart Marie, life is good. Your arch nemesis Bains is dead, and peace and quiet has returned to Lytton. That is, until Marie is attacked in a parking lot, and ends up in a coma. You will have to investigate whether this was an incident, or perhaps if there's more to the attack. Was it a lone robbery, or part of an intricate series of similar attacks? And if the latter, who on earth would be behind it, and why?


Police Quest 3, unlike it predecessors Police Quest and Police Quest 2, is the first installment of the Police Quest series to feature a point-and-click interface, rather than relying on typed commands. It uses the Sierra SCI (Sierra's Create Interpreter) engine, and features music by Jan Hammer, who was also responsible for the Miami Vice soundtrack.

Just like in the original Police Quest, The Kindred will see you drive around a lot, including waiting for events to happen (being overtaken by speeding cars, or receiving other alerts of vehicles you ought to take action on). While not as likely to lead to certain death as in part 1, it's still quite cumbersome. Also, whenever you do pull someone over for anything, ensure you note the time, because you might end up needing it for any tickets you are writing them. In fact, you'd better have pen and paper ready, because you'll also have to jolt down case numbers, serial numbers and what not.

Personally, I'm not overly fond of the look and feel of the game, compared with the older Sierra adventures. I realize the issues I'm seeing are primarily due to the limited technology and restrictions due to hardware and software limitations back in the days, but the animations all just look extremely wooden and non-natural. When a dialogue starts, you will see an image of the people in the conversation, and while the mouth moves, the entire rest of their face will remain absolutely static, which destroys the realism the team was undoubtedly aiming for. Likewise, when Sonny walks from the elevator to his office, the sprite of his body shrinks ridiculously fast.

There's a lot of seemingly pointless driving back and forth. In PQ2, you were able to simply type: "DRIVE TO JAIL", but here you have to check the map every time to ensure you end up at the right part of the map. There's a lot of repetitive actions as well (sliding your keycard into the computer whenever you want to use it, using the elevator, picking up and replacing the individual items in the field kit) that somehow managed to annoy me to some minor extent. Out of the Police Quest series so far, this is absolutely my least favorite one.