If you dig a little deeper than the large budget mainstream console port riddled surface of PC gaming, you will come across genres that were around in the early years that are still flourishing. Genres like the point-n-click adventure game genre, which is going as strong as ever if you look hard enough - it's just not at the forefront of PC gaming anymore, what with all these new fangled 3D graphics and gamepads. One of the forces behind many of today's adventure titles for the PC is publisher The Adventure Company and recently they teamed up with developer Streko Graphics to update the Aura series with Aura 2: The Sacred Rings - a game that embodies adventure gaming traditions well, although perhaps a little too well.

Aura 2 is really not a game that will blow you away at all - the moment your are graced by the low resolution and plain looking main menu that could have been designed in Word, you know you're not exactly in for PC gaming's epic hit of the season. It also becomes abundantly clear after the introductory movie sequence that you're probably going to be in for a reasonably generic storyline too, featuring the usual magical artifacts of power, the evil force trying to obtain this power, and "the chosen one" who has to save the world himself - i.e. you. Don't get too discouraged though, as there is some quality to be had with Aura 2 - for some people at least.

One of the first things you'll notice about Aura 2 is it's a point-n-click adventure game to the absolute core. While you can pan around most environments like you are looking at a 3D world, the graphics in Aura 2 are very much pre-rendered which means you can only move in areas that the game has artwork for, so put away your WASD keys as there is absolutely no freedom of movement here at all. Everything is done with your mouse in Aura 2, from moving to the next area to picking up objects and activating puzzles.

Unlike a lot of adventure games which follow this style, Aura 2 is played from a first person perspective meaning you never see your character during actual gameplay. This is not necessarily a bad thing but personally I prefer having a camera view that is further out so I can see more of the environment at a time. Also, having a third person perspective would have forced Aura 2 to render the movements your character makes which I would have preferred over the game's actual method of rendering movement - not showing it all. When you move from one area to another in Aura 2, you just spawn at the new spot like you walked through a teleporter.

This is somewhat of a traditional system in adventure games, but personally, I'm not a big fan of it. One reason for this is because, by the time the game fades out, loads your new area which is only a few steps ahead and then fades in, a third person view rendered character would have probably been quick enough to move onto the next room entirely - this somewhat slow pace of Aura 2 is further emphasized by the fact the game loves to put what feels like an excessive amount of movement points in areas such as staircases and hallways where they really weren't necessary. I can understand the game wants to set a particular mood and atmosphere, but wading through movement point after movement point until you get to where you know you need to go can get very tedious, particularly when the task at hand requires you to go back and forth between certain points, and half of the areas you needed to go through serve absolutely no practical purpose whatsoever.

As you move around the very surreal world of Aura 2, you will probably start to notice that the hotzones to initiate a movement to a new area are quite small in many instances not to mention occasionally oddly placed, which doesn't do the game any favours. Another issue somewhat related is that he cursor icon for when you hover over an object that you can pick up or interact with is similar to the game's normal mouse cursor icon, so you will often fail to notice when you've hovered over something important. I'm not sure if this was deliberate to add a further level of difficulty to the game, but in any case it is a moderate annoyance that can be responsible for some frustrating "what do I do now" moments.

The interact cursor isn't the sole reason for this though, as the game makes sure to give you very few direct instructions along the way for what to do next. Occasionally you'll have character dialogue that will offer hints and Umang, your character, may think something out loud here and there, but in general the game leaves the vast majority of thinking up to you. This certainly won't be a positive for everyone, but for the audience that Aura 2 is directed at, I think it is a good move to try and make an adventure game challenging in more ways than just the raw puzzle solving.

That's not to belittle the game's puzzles however, which are splendid in design and complexity from top to bottom. In fact, if puzzle solving if your forte, I think I can safely say all the negatives up until this point in the review can be ignored. Aura 2 is one of those adventure games that will really have you thinking, and I reckon even the genre's most season veterans will find a challenge here. If I had to find a gripe though, it would be with the fact that the vast majority of puzzles aren't what I'd call practical - they don't really seem relevant to the world around them, as if they're just hard puzzles for the sake of being hard puzzles. I know Aura 2 is based in a fantasy world and hence who am I to say what is and isn't normal, but even so, some of the puzzles can detract from the game's storyline to the point you feel as if you're playing two different games at once - one with a storyline, the other some flash game at puzzles.com or something.

If you're not terribly good at puzzle solving and finding patterns amongst sometimes very obscure clues, then Aura 2 will likely just frustrate you as most puzzles, like the world around them, are very surreal and hold little connection to our world. Ultimately, most of the puzzles can be broken down into fundamental brain teasers but quite a few others almost seem like they require pre-existing knowledge of the world in Aura 2, which is obviously a slight exaggeration as the game will always throws clues at you, but sometimes you still have to connect some pretty unlikely dots - so unlikely that I think even the most patient gamer in the world will feel burnt out at times during Aura 2.

In all fairness though, I must admit this hardcore traditionalist take on adventure gaming was likely never going to be my cup of tea and while I did appreciate the effort and mostly flawless design of the game's puzzles (usually once I finished them anyway), I found it hard to overlook the aforementioned shortcomings. For somebody who thrives on puzzle solving and doesn't care too much about engaging storylines and revolutionary game engines, Aura 2 is very likely a perfect match, I just question whether this was the best direction to go with the game. Nevertheless, Aura 2 is what it is - a no thrills, generic feeling adventure game that could have been released a decade or more ago, which happens to have some very intricately designed puzzles. It is therefore not a very complete adventure game, but one which I'm sure will please a few gamers out there.