Breakout Great Northern

A fun way to pass an hour whether with a group of friends or colleagues. If there’s enough of you then you can compete against each other in the two identical rooms.
Having previously completed the Sabotage room in the Brazzenose street Breakout, the AMC rooms are an excellent prequel to give you a taste of what’s to come and teach you some of the skills you need.
There’s no particular theme to these rooms other than to break out of the room in under an hour. Lots of codes to find and work out.
Fortunately I was on the winning team, we escaped with 7 minutes to spare!

James C pointed out in his review that this is a great prequel to the Brazzenose street Breakout. He’s right. Unfortunately if it happens to be a sequel (i.e. you’ve already been to the other one), prepare to be disappointed. I loved the attention to detail and layout of the room/​s in Brazzenose street branch. Clearly a lot of effort had gone into it. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case with the great northern venue.
I was very excited to meet up with Jonny Q and few other Unilocalers to try out the new room. I loved the storyline and narrative of the theme in the other venue which was sadly missing on this occasion. A feeling of dissappointment washed over me and a few others however when we realised we were in a large open generic office space which had clues equally spaced out around it. There was little narrative/​theme and whilst there was a general layout and sequence it didn’t induce the sort of excitement that’ll bring me back.
There was very little mystery with all the puzzles clearly visible (I remember discovering two new rooms and treasure chests in pitch dark last time, what happened?). The room was also littered with more padlocks than you can shake a stick at. The music was annoying rather than adding «atmosphere». And when I said open office space, I mean you could on occasion hear the people at reception as well as the other team downstairs. If the Brazzenose street Breakout is a meticulously designed well thought out escape room, then Breakout Northern is a bit of a half hearted rushed affair in a not so well thought out/​designed space.
But as James said it can be a decent prequel. My only contention is that it might put people off going to Brazzenose street rather than encouraging them.