Dynamix, back in the 80's, was mainly known for their tank and plane simulation games, usually published by companies like Electronic Arts and Activision. But in 1990, it was decided that the company simply wasn't selling enough games to keep themselves afloat, and they opted to put the company up for sale. In August of that year, Sierra On-Line answered the call and inducted Dynamix into the Sierra family.

After that, things started to change. While Dynamix was still making their simulation games - and even enjoying somewhat improved sales from them, thanks to Sierra's improved marketing - the company started to veer in different directions. As early as 1990, Dynamix began making point and click adventure games. Despite Dynamix being a division of Sierra, Dynamix's adventure games take on a markedly different style from Sierra's. While Sierra's adventures like Space Quest were presented from the third person and tended to have more of a sense of humor, Dynamix's games were first person in every sense of the word. Their first point and click adventure, Rise of the Dragon, presented the world from protagonist Blade Hunter's eyes, and every single object was described as if Blade himself were looking at it, resulting in some off-the-cuff remarks about the state of LA's water system.

In 1991, the second game built on the Dynamix Game Development System (DGDS) was released: Heart of China.

So the story goes, the daughter of a wealthy land-owner is kidnapped by a Chinese warlord, and it's up to former Great War ace pilot "Lucky" Jake Masters, out of work and with nothing left but his plane, a Colt 1911 and his wits, to bail her out and get her back to her father - whether she likes it or not!

As the game begins, your "client", E. A. Lomax (gee, I wonder which famous game company this man is supposed to represent?), has sent you to the Chinese mainland to track down some leads as to Kate Lomax's disappearance. To ensure Lucky gets the job done quickly, Lomax makes a deal: 200,000 dollars will be awarded to Lucky for the safe return of his daughter, but 20,000 will be deducted for every day that passes. This leaves Lucky with no room for mistakes - and no sampan, as a hired goon lobs a grenade into it at the beginning of the game.

Heart of China plays out an awful lot like an Indiana Jones movie - the American protagonist, the ethnic sidekick, the love interest that isn't interested. Though Dynamix does some things with the game that other games hadn't quite figured out. For starters, the game has numerous plot branches that, while events seem similar, might end up making the game even harder. All the characters in this game are real actors, setting the standard for later Dynamix games like Betrayal at Krondor (and supposedly, this game has a cast numbering in the hundreds). While most of the environments are hand-drawn, they are done in a style that blends very well with the digitized actors. The photographs are occasionally a little grainy, but given the hardware limitations and time frame, they're better-looking than most DOS games of the time. And while the music isn't especially memorable, it does a very good job of pulling you into the game's Eastern flavor.

Dynamix's style of adventure game hinges on trial and error, and this is true not only of the game's various puzzles, but of the very interface used to control the game. Like Rise of the Dragon before it, the inventory is icon-based and takes up most of the screen when open. There are two ways to use your inventory. Left-clicking on the icon representing your character will open a half-screen inventory, along the left side of the screen. From here you can drag the inventory items from the window and drop them on whatever object in the scene that you need to use it on. The other way is right-clicking on your character icon, which brings the inventory up to full-screen, though this doesn't give you any more space, it just adds a portrait of your character to the right side of the screen and disables the ability to drag the icons into the scene. From here, you can either drag items onto your portrait to equip them (like Lucky's gun, Zhao Chi's ninja mask, etc) or right-click on any object to get more information about it. Infuriatingly, looking at any item in half-screen mode kicks the inventory into full-screen, and there's no way to simply switch back - to use items while in full-screen mode, you'll have to drop them first (thankfully they aren't lost for good, but don't forget about them and leave them there), and then drag them from the bottom of the screen to where you need to use them at. Not a very intuitive system at all.

As if that weren't enough, occasionally the game will outright change the rules of how you're supposed to interact with things. Eventually, Lucky will need to use his Colt pistol, which to most people probably means to either drag it from the inventory and drop it on Lucky's target, or have Lucky equip it and then click on the target. Both are incorrect - the game expects you to equip the gun, then hold the right mouse button and click the left. This action doesn't work at all unless the game actually wants you to shoot something (which is rare), giving the player very little opportunity to get a feel for it.

Finally, true to Dynamix's style of interactive movie-style story telling, there is at least one arcade sequence in Heart of China, a tank simulator using the 3D simulator engines that Dynamix is so fond of. The tank chase is a neat idea, and is pretty intense and fun the first couple of times, but it's really, really hard (especially if your computer is too fast, as there is no game speed cap). Thankfully, the developers opted to show mercy, allowing you to skip this sequence completely if you fail enough times.

With as long as I've spent going on about how many issues Heart of China's interface has, you'd expect that I don't like the game very much. But honestly? I love it. Even in spite of some of the most harebrained puzzles, the strangest solutions, and aggravating situations created by not having a certain inventory item (yes, this is one of those games where you can get irrevocably stuck!)...this game still has some pretty good writing, a story that's up there with the better adventure games, and characters that actually seem real. The team at Dynamix clearly loved the story they worked so hard for, and it shows in the writing, the artwork, just about everything.

Heart of China is a beautiful game, though the obscurity of some of the puzzle solutions and the suddenly-introduced arcade sequences might put off adventurers who don't play a lot of action games. I must say, though, that if you persevere, you'll be rewarded with a pretty darned good game.