Sherlock Holmes Chapter One Reviews
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One takes the series in a completely opposite direction of its predecessors, souring its potential in favor of adding gameplay elements that pad runtime and take away from the investigations. Fans of the series may find some joy in getting to experience the original content or solving clues the hard way, but I was certainly not one of them.
The 1st chapter of Sherlock Holmes seems broken and lost, and fails to fully satisfy even the hardcore fans of the character.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Chapter One got plenty of mechanics, but those doesn't add up into the solid picture, and the open-world minimizes all of the few good pieces that are there.
Review in Russian | Read full review
There are a lot of things to admire in Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, and when it works, it all comes together in a fantastic new way. Unfortunately, there are far too many instances of clues that perhaps made sense to the team that made it, but not the player. Just when you start finding your stride, a roadblock appears as you struggle to figure out your next steps. The jump to an open-world setting ultimately feels unnecessary and adds to the confusion. Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is not a bad game at all, but the experimental gameplay feels like a missed opportunity that a sequel could perhaps refine.
Technical issues and an excessively padded out plot makes Frogwares' open-world rendition of its Sherlock Holmes games a disappointing experience.
A lot of the issues with Sherlock Holmes Chapter One can be resolved with updates. The performances issues can be ironed out, John's obnoxious behavior can be toned down, and an improved hint system could remove the frustration of being lost during a case. With a few tweaks, Sherlock Holmes Chapter One could be an interesting open-world twist on the detective genre. As it stands, the game at launch still needs work before Sherlock Holmes can fully embrace his role as the greatest detective of all time.
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One should, on paper, be the best game out of Frogwares yet. It brings back all those satisfying detective features of the past and couples them with new mechanics and interactions. However, many of them are either surplus or frustrating enough to where they sometimes detract from the overall experience. And with a lifeless open world that doesn't run particularly well at even the best of times, it's not an easy recommendation. What fans loved from past Sherlock Holmes instalments is still there, but you'll need to do a bit of overtime to find it.
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a decent adventure game that lets you play as the great detective. The trouble is, it wants to be more than that. It wants to be an action-adventure game with an open world. It wants Sherlock to be a fun and interesting player character, but the game makes him drag around a buddy who’s even less helpful than Watson.
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a decent detective game set in an open-world that's a bit too elementary.
The game offers a fun experience and hearty issues for those looking for an accurate simulation experience of the role of the investigator but fails to satisfy our curiosity about the story and the results of some issues, an experience that has suffered some serious errors in storytelling.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
I've struggled to properly rate Sherlock Holmes Chapter One. On the one hand, it does some great things in terms of the cases and the provided tools to solve those cases. I enjoyed that it never gave me an answer, and I had to arrive at my own conclusions given the evidence I'd found. On the other hand, the game is in a rough technical state with frequent frame rate issues on the PS5, basic animations that feel robotic, an empty open world, and voice acting that can pull you out of the experience at times. Fans of Sherlock Holmes or adventure games can check out Chapter One, simply for everything that it does right.
Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One successfully puts you into the shoes of London’s greatest detective, albeit with crippling, pace-killer conveyance issues. However, the precision-based combat, fun crime scene investigations and decent story help to mitigate the general lack of direction. Holmes is also as sassy as ever.
Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is a great detective game that’s saddled with unfortunately mediocre combat and the occasionally obtuse clue to impede progression. Still, when it works, you feel like a true genius detective, so if you’re a fan of mystery games or Holmes himself, this may be the game for you.
The mystery-solving core mechanics of the Sherlock Holmes Chapter are interesting and challenging, but the rest of the game just feels superfluous.
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One might take the franchise in an awesome new direction with a really nice island to explore, lots of fun mysteries to solve and some good production values as an overall package. The game lets itself down when it comes to the clunky quest diary and the nonsensical system of having to pin items of importance in order to make conversations and even items appear in the world that should have already been there. The game's lack of handholding is by far its biggest strength but by adding so many pieces of ambiguous evidence to a mystery and making you pin the right one so items appear in the game world becomes frustrating to figure out what to do when you get stuck and have dozens of items to pin to see if you get a response out of people.
A work that combines its fascinating story with fun mechanisms and turns the gamer into Sherlock Holmes for hours.
Review in Persian | Read full review
A fresh and emotional take on the Sherlock Holmes property creates the best narrative in the series yet, but it’s let down by some ambitious design choices.
Despite a few missteps in terms of the combat, if you're a fan of detective games then Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a pretty easy one to recommend. Getting to do things like interviewing witnesses or performing chemical analysis on suspicious evidence is an absolute blast. The island of Cordona is chock full of cases for you to investigate and while there are a few technical issues with the open world setting it's easy enough to forgive when sleuthing around is this much fun.
If you can get through the relatively humdrum, lifeless and unneeded open world of Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One you'll uncover a whip smart detective adventure that is up there with the series best. It's just a shame that a smattering of technical issues and poorly executed combat sections detract from what should have been the Pride of Baker Street's triumphant return to PlayStation.
Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One deviates little from the established Frogwares detective game template, but that doesn't stop it from being a compelling adventure and perhaps one of the studio's stronger games overall. It's got a meaty and intriguing core story, loads to see and do off the main path, and some swerving cases that will take some serious sleuthing to come to the right conclusions — I'm not sure what more you could really ask for from a game like this besides that tried-and-tested trifecta, except maybe a little more polish. The lack thereof doesn't hurt the game too much, mind, so if you enjoy solving crimes while being really, really, really ridiculously good-looking, this mid-price mystery should definitely find its way onto your wishlist.