Atlantis Evolution
Atlantis Evolution is the first in a projected series of Atlantis
games made by Atlantis Interactive Entertainment. The development
team for Atlantis Evolution includes among their members some of the
same people who worked on the original three Atlantis games from the
now-defunct Cryo Interactive Entertainment. Although Dreamcatcher/The
Adventure Company makes it clear that Atlantis Evolution is the
start of a new direction for their Atlantis games, there are
certainly some resemblances to the earlier games. The graphics have
a somewhat different "look" to them, being less "naturalistic" than
the Cryo games. But the game interface will be familiar to anyone
who's played the earlier Atlantis games. And since the previous
Atlantis games all play so differently from one another, you could
also say that Atlantis Evolution is continuing the tradition of its
predecessors. (There is even an Atlantis4.cfg file in the game
folder, which suggests another tie with the previous three Atlantis
games.)
The story begins in 1904 with the hero, photographer Curtis Hewitt,
returning home from a trip to Patagonia aboard an old wreck of a
ship called the Lemuria. The ship goes down in a storm and Curtis
survives in a lifeboat, only to be sucked down a whirlpool. What
happens next has to be seen to be believed, so I won't spoil it. But
soon afterward, Curtis ends up in "New Atlantis" and must find a way
not only to get back home, but to free the Atlantean population from
their terrible bloodthirsty "gods."
Installation
Atlantis Evolution comes on four CD's and installs completely to the
hard drive. There is no need to have a CD in the drive in order to
play the game. Congratulations to the developer and publisher for
implementing this convenience.
Controls
The control scheme will be familiar to anyone who has played the
previous Cryo Atlantis games. Atlantis Evolution uses a first person
point of view for the interactive parts of the game, so you'll only
see your character during cut scenes and conversations. Like the
earlier Atlantis games, it uses a node based movement system with
360° panning available at the nodes. You are also able to pan upward
and downward. You can't look directly up or directly down, but there
is a good range of movement. The game uses fixed cursor panning and
there is no option for edge panning.
When forward movement is possible, the movement cursor will appear.
It is the same rounded arrow cursor used in earlier Atlantis games.
Left-clicking on the cursor will move you to the next node. Movement
is instantaneous with no transitions playing between nodes.
Right-clicking will bring up the inventory along the bottom of the
screen. Hovering your cursor over inventory items will produce a
tooltip type description of them. You can also examine objects in
inventory by right-clicking on them. A full screen view of the item
will appear. A left-click will return you to the game screen.
Left-clicking on an inventory item will pick it up and attach it to
your cursor. A right-click on the game screen will close the
inventory and allow you to use the inventory object. Some inventory
objects can be combined with other inventory objects.
Exploring your screen with your cursor may reveal pulsating hotspots
which indicate potentially interactive locations. If a hotspot
appears dead, it may be that you don't have the inventory item to
use on it yet. Your character will often comment to cue you in on
what might be needed.
When you can speak with another character, a hotspot with two heads
rotating around each other will appear if you move your cursor over
the character. Conversation choices appear as a group of little
square icons that you can click on. These icons are small pictures
of the subject of the conversation, which can be a character, an
object, or a location. This conversation system will be familiar to
players of the previous Atlantis games.
The controls for the arcade games will vary. Almost everything can
be done by mouse, but with some games it may be preferable to use
the keyboard arrows.
Menus and Options
I
encountered the first puzzle immediately on starting the game: a
Mystery Meat game menu - obscure symbols in shades of blue with no
text. I had a moment of trepidation, wondering if my video card was
having troubles rendering the text. But no, when I hovered my cursor
over certain alien symbols on the screen, a light bar would pass
over the symbol and a tooltip-type description would appear. In my
opinion this is bad design. I think a control menu should be as
simple and obvious as possible. It is all very well to be artistic
with your game menus, but the art should not get in the way of
functionality. The entire contents of the menu should be viewable at
once, without having to explore the screen with your cursor. Imagine
if every menu on your computer were set up like this. You'd miss
seeing all sorts of options and controls. Just because the options
menu of a game is more simplistic than Windows controls is no reason
to make it a pixel hunt. And the gamer should never have a moment of
wondering if their video card isn't displaying the text.
When you first start the game, you will be presented with a menu
where you choose whether you want to play as Player 1, Player 2,
Player 3, Player 4, or Player 5. You will probably have to load a
player before you can use the Escape key to access the Save/Load
Menu and Options Menus.
As far as I could tell, you are allowed an unlimited number of
saves. Saves include a small screenshot of the location where you
saved along with the date and time. You can't name your save. To
save your game, you click the Escape key, locate the Mystery Meat
tooltip that reveals the place to click if you want to save, and
click it. Then click on a check mark to indicate that you do indeed
want to save, or on an X to indicate you changed your mind. Then
locate the Mystery Meat tooltip that says Return to Game or the
Mystery Meat tooltip that says Exit Game, depending on which you
want to do. The process is similar for loading a game.
The options menu is also Mystery Meat and it isn't at all clear
whether you are toggling something on or off. The box with the
little "+" in it will give you a cross hair if the "+" is visible in
the box. You can choose to play in 16-bit or 32-bit color. There is
an option to invert mouse orientation. A languages option only had
English as a choice in my North American version of the game.
(Perhaps European versions will have options for multiple
languages?) There was an option to toggle "smooth mode" or "no
smooth mode." (I can only guess at what that meant. I just stuck
with whatever the default selection was.) Subtitles are toggled on
when you see indecipherable letters in a little box, off when the
box appears empty. Come on now, game designers. I don't want to have
to play guessing games in the options menu. I appreciate all these
options, but why make their selection so obscure?
The volume controls are available through a Sound Levels Menu that
is accessible from the Save/Load Menu (not the Options screen).
There are separate volume controls for Voices Volume, Music Volume,
Sound Effects Volume, and Overall Volume.
Graphics
The graphics play in 1024x768 and are very detailed and colorful.
The game is jam-packed with different kinds of animations. The
unusual plant life in forest areas, which is somewhat reminiscent of
various underwater flora and fauna, undulates and sways as if it
were underwater. Spores and bubbles float upward from colorful fungi
and mushroom-like plants. There are colorful birds, butterflies, and
other insects flitting and buzzing around everywhere. Snakes slither
along the ground and lizards skitter up trees. Most areas have water
animation and it looks pretty convincing. The world is alive with
animations.
Not all areas are "pretty." The game starts out with your character
on the ship Lemuria, as decrepit a rust bucket as you could ever
hope to see. The corrosion is detailed and there are even some
animations, like the flicker of Curtis' candle and the small
circular porthole of a window in Curtis' cabin constantly falling
open because the catch is broken.
The cut scenes that occasionally play in the game are real
eye-catchers. The scenes of the storm at the beginning of the game
are dramatic and get the game off to a promising start. Nearly all
the major cut scenes are of similar high quality. The animation of
the characters isn't quite up to the level of the animation of the
landscape, though in this case that isn't so important. The
characters are cartoony rather than realistic and can get away with
moving in slightly unrealistic ways. One place where the designers
appear to have taken shortcuts with the character animation is
during conversations, when the characters use the same series of
gestures each time they speak. Lip synch does not match up in the
English version of the game, though this is not a major problem and
is perhaps to be expected with a game that was developed in France.
Also the character models for the guards come in two varieties,
those with helmets and those without. The ones without helmets look
identical to one another. I don't know why this would be the case
unless they were clones. But the ex-guard Chel looked different, so
he at least wasn't a clone.
Sound
Care was taken to match the high quality of the visuals with
appropriate background sounds and music. The Lemuria had the sound
of the storm outside, the creaking of the wood, the exhausting of
steam, and the sound of the window slamming shut. The forest had the
sounds of birds and insects. Water sounds were also varied and
especially effective in the cave area. Music, when it played during
interactive parts of the game, tended to blend into the background,
though at times it was obviously meant to build tension or signal
the presence of danger. My favorite music was toward the end of the
game. The mysterious, somewhat ominous music that played in the
gods' living quarters matched the rich satiny colors and the
strangely alien, yet opulent quality of the environment. Somehow it
gave me the impression of a mausoleum, which was not inappropriate.
Like the character design, voices were also somewhat cartoony. Most
of them were good in a cartoony sort of way. But the voice of the
little boy sounded like it would have been more appropriate for a
talking frog than for a little boy. If independent game developers
on a shoestring budget can manage to find children to voice the
parts of children, I don't see why it should be so difficult for a
game company. If for some reason a child is not available, then a
woman with a boyish voice could do the part. But an adult male
speaking in a strained falsetto is not an acceptable substitute.
I'm not sure why the developers had the game take place in 1904,
because Curtis Hewitt's accent sounded very modern. I also wonder
about the "modern" speech of the gods, especially the young
goddesses Kama and Sama, whose slang expressions would not come into
being for another hundred years or so. I guess we're not supposed
to think about this sort of thing, since if the game was
"realistic," the Atlanteans and their gods would all be speaking
Atlantean and Curtis wouldn't be able to communicate with them at
all.
Puzzles
Sounds pretty good up to this point, doesn't it? A few niggles, but
nothing critical. Well now comes the bad news. The creators of
Atlantis Evolution made some really regrettable design decisions
when it came to puzzles (or maybe I should call them "challenges").
You encounter death early in the game, and there's really no way to
avoid it. You have to endure it until you can figure out what you're
supposed to do to avoid it, or outrun it. Even though the game
automatically restores you, it gets very tedious because of its
frequency.
The worst part of the game (to my mind) isn't the first
death-dealing area, but the area in the forest after you leave the
village. Every few seconds guards appear and shoot you. You'll be
trying to search the environment for inventory, not even sure what
you're looking for, and control will be wrested from you by an
automatic cut scene showing the appearance of a guard and your
character writhing on the ground after being zapped by some sort of
zap gun. Although you'll be restored, you won't be where you were
when you were zapped. So you'll have to hotfoot it back over to the
node where you were searching and furiously pan around trying to
locate inventory before you're spotted and zapped again. Alas for
those who have a tendency to develop motion sickness in games that
use fixed cursor panning. Usually I don't have a problem with such
games because I can pan slowly. But you can't do that in this part
of the game. All you can do is grit your teeth, hold onto your
stomach and hope for the best. Keep a bucket handy. Increasing the
aggravation level is the screechy mechanical voice that you have to
endure during this desperate inventory search. Such tired phrases as
"Halt, deviant!" "Grovel immediately, deviant. You will be
realigned!" "Deviancy is death! Do not move during targeting!" "We
are here to help you!" "You have left the Beaten track! Report for
realignment!" will get on your last nerve as they put an end to your
explorations until the next die/restore. They will make you want to
put your foot through your monitor and spout words you didn't know
were in your vocabulary. It's just terrible. Bad, bad, bad. I don't
want to see this kind of thing again. Ever.
There is also a part of the game that reminded me very much of
certain parts of Atlantis: The Lost Tales. It involves timing the
movements of guards and taking actions according to their movements.
If you mess up, it's "Stop, deviant" time again. Your nerves,
already frayed and sensitized by similar assaults earlier in the
game, will go into paroxysms. Your monitor will tremble with fear as
your foot looms ever closer. My advice is to save yourself twenty
headaches and the cost of a new monitor and consult a walkthrough to
get through this bit as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, the whole game is not like this. But there are some
inventory searches that will probably cause other problems. Remember
the star hunt puzzle in the Maya area of Atlantis II (Beyond
Atlantis)? There's something very similar in this game. To be sure,
the forest is much more colorful and fanciful than the jungle in
Atlantis II, and you don't have nearly as many items to find. But
there is the same mazelike quality and the confusion of 360° panning
with sometimes more than two exit points from a node. It's hard to
tell where you've been because the flora is so similar throughout
the forest. Although it wasn't as difficult as the star hunt in
Atlantis II, those who could not stand that puzzle will likely have
problems with the forest in Atlantis Evolution as well. At least it
wasn't timed and no guards molested you during your search.
And now we come to the mini-games. They really do not match the rest
of the game. It's kind of like finding a slider on the door of a
bathroom. The previous Atlantis games were relatively untroubled by
this type of thing. Atlantis: The Lost Tales had the rat catcher's
puzzle and the little game you had to play with the cannibal. But
the mini-games in Lost Tales had some connection to the people in
the game and their graphics matched the graphical style of the game
as a whole. This is not the case with the mini-games in Atlantis
Evolution. To open doors and other locks you access an ornate
circular control panel and lo and behold there is this funny little
brightly colored 2D arcade game there waiting for you. Now I'm sure
some people would rather see an arcade game than a slider, but why
should we see either one? Do you know anyone who plays adventure
games whenever they're in the mood for an arcade game? I'm not
particularly good at arcade games. Actually I stink at them. It took
me about 20 tries to get past the "Monkey and the Boats and the Big
Bacteria" game (a variant of Frogger). And then there's "Bombs and
Lasers" where you fly a teeny little 2D Atlantean airship, dropping
bombs and shooting lasers at little people who are shooting arrows
at you from the ground and gods that fly through the air shooting
evil pink, yellow, or green spots at you. Not all the mini-games
depend on your reflexes. There was also the "Blast the Other Guy's
Volcano First" game, which was more about aiming than about
reflexes. It almost got to be a running joke in the game. Whenever I
had to access one of those circular control panels, what new
silliness would I encounter? You want crates? Here's the original 2D
Sokoban - the easiest, most basic orientations you can find. And
imagine my surprise to see a Tower of Hanoi puzzle with a whopping
two disks to sort. Successive Tower of Hanoi puzzles would add a
disk. It was like a trainer series. If the easiness of the Sokoban
and Tower of Hanoi puzzles is any indication, I think the mini-games
were all meant to be very easy versions. But the game designers
don't seem to have taken into account the age and inability of some
adventure gamers, who play adventure games instead of other genres
because they hope to avoid physical "challenges."
Now lest you think Atlantis Evolution was all silly annoyances, the
last part of the game, starting from when I finally reached the
gods' place of residence, played much more like an adventure game
and was unquestionably the most fun. I was no longer attacked by
guards and could devote my attention to exploring and discovering
the secret of what lay behind the situation at New Atlantis. There
was more dialogue in this part of the game and I found a lot of it
to be very entertaining in a camp sort of way. Also, the bulk of the
story unfolded in the last part of the game. I only wish the rest of
the game had been like this last part. It gave me a glimpse of how
much fun the game could have been if it had been more consistent.
The only really "unfair" puzzle I encountered toward the end of the
game involved having to use an inventory item on the movement cursor
instead of on a hotspot.
Required Specs
(as listed at TAC)
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Pentium III 850 MHz (1 GHz or
better recommended)
64 MB system RAM (128 MB
recommended)
24x CDROM Drive (32x CDROM or
better recommended)
32 MB DirectX 8.0 compatible 3D
video card (or higher)
DirectSound compatible sound card
4.0 GB hard drive space
The computers I played it on
Dell 4800
Windows XP Home SP1
Pentium 4 3200 MHz
1024 MB system RAM
ATI Radeon X800 SE 128 MB (PCI
Express)
SBLive (OEM version from Dell)
DirectX 9.0b
Windows 2000 SP2
Athlon XP 1800+ (about 1533 MHz)
512 MB system RAM
16x/10x/12x/40x Toshiba SD-R1202
combo drive
Matrox G550 graphics card with 32
MB video RAM
SBLive Value 5.1
DirectX 8.1b
Possible Glitches
For most of the game, when I loaded a saved game, there was no music
or background sound. Voices worked normally. But until I moved into
another area that had a different background ambiance, there was
silence. This happened with both of my test computers and happened
whether I had just started up the game or whether I'd been playing
and decided to go back to a previous save. There were some areas
later in the game where the music and background sound loaded
normally, but these areas seemed to be an exception. Except for this
problem I did not encounter any technical glitches on either
computer. And the game looked just as good and played just as well
on the slower computer with its Matrox G550 video card, which is not
considered a "gaming card."
Additional comments
Atlantis Evolution is a relatively short game (unless you get hung
up on one of the timed sequences, an inventory hunt, or the one spot
at the end of the game where there is that subtle change in where
and how you can use inventory). The third time I played the game, I
timed myself. It took 3 hours and 48 minutes to complete, and this
includes time spent exhausting all conversations and having to
repeat some of the arcade puzzles several times. I would have liked
to have spent more time with the Forest people (called "the First
People" in the game). We don't learn much about them other than that
they lived inside the earth before the Atlanteans came. Miranda and
her grandmother were more interesting to talk to than the villagers
who were either too afraid to speak or had been mind-wiped
("realigned"). Chel the ex-guard was also an interesting character
and I would have liked to play as Chel part of the time, perhaps to
create a diversion while Curtis snuck into an installation or
something. I think the story in Atlantis Evolution could have been
made more interesting if the characters had been fleshed out more
and the story had had more twists and turns in it. Too much was left
until the end of the game. If a story has a beginning, a middle, and
an end, this one needed more middle.
Who is the target audience for Atlantis Evolution? Young novice
adventure gamers who normally play other genres won't have any
trouble with the arcade games. And they will probably appreciate the
relatively easy adventure-type puzzles, with the exception of the
inventory location puzzles. Inventory location doesn't require
logical thought so much as patience. The 360° panning makes
inventory tricky to locate. It is relatively easy to get lost in the
forest and lose track of which nodes you have searched for
inventory, and this may well prove frustrating for many gamers. I
don't think the timed inventory hunt will please anyone. Despite the
relative simplicity of the layout of the area, it is too easy to
miss things simply because you don't have time to see them before
you are killed. Established adventure gamers who like to challenge
their minds will likely find the adventure game type puzzles too
easy. Older gamers, or those with physical limitations may find the
arcade games too difficult to complete, despite the ridiculous ease
with which younger gamers (and those older ones with no reflex
problems) will speed past what will seem to them to be beginner
level games. The gamer most likely to enjoy this game would be
someone who plays all different genres and is looking for an easy
game, yet doesn't mind slowing down for an inventory hunt. Most
gamers are going to find something about the game that will annoy
them. The quality of the gameplay is too inconsistent for it to be
considered more than an average game, despite the beauty of its graphics
and (as far as I can tell) the stability of its game engine.
Recommendations
Atlantis Evolution is a good-looking game with some great animated
sequences and a fun, if somewhat campy story. But since this is a
GameBoomers review and I know some GameBoomers members are
physically unable to handle even relatively simple dexterity-based
"challenges," I can't give it an unreserved recommendation. However,
if you can handle the action-based parts, you may enjoy the
adventure-style parts and the exceptional graphics and animations.
Overall Grade
C
design copyright ©
2004
GameBoomers
Group
