Helpful advice and links

Find Software: Downloads FTP Search Our Privacy Vow

Atlantis II

This is one good-looking game. Most of it consists of three separate worlds in separate centuries. If you play the game, you will be an Irish Monk, an Aztec warrior and an Chinese bureaucrat from some dynasty or the other. You will traipse over a beautiful emerald green isle, a lush jungle and an elegant temple. Each world will have its own music, and all of it gorgeous.

The people in "Atlantis II" look great. Some ingenious technique is used that make them look almost lifelike. There are many beautiful cut scenes; I particularly liked the little wooden dolls coming to life.

But like a cake with a bit of walnut shell mixed in, you could break your teeth biting into one of "Atlantis II"'s puzzles.

Okay, enough with the dessert analogy, let's get down to it.

In "Atlantis II" you are some guy who for some reason must inhabit other people's bodies and help them do whatever needs doing. I started out in the Mayan world, didn't get far simply because I missed an exit, went back to ground zero, tried the Chinese world, liked it pretty well, ground zero, tried the Irish world, and then decided of the three I would play through the Chinese world first. This turned out to be the best choice, allowing me to get some enjoyment out of the game before it started to really aggravate me.

As a passing Chinese bureaucrat you are called upon to rid a temple of a shadow at the door. It's not made clear what the objection is to the shadow, but you can't leave until you've ousted it. And in typical adventure game fashion you talk to a lot of people, get some items, and figure some stuff out.

It was all pretty good until this thing with these disks. You have to place them in a certain order, and I couldn't figure out the order. Then I read a walkthrough (no one had made a UHS file for the game yet) and it told me the order, but even knowing the order I still couldn't figure out the rules of the puzzle. When the UHS file came out I read the explanation, and you know what, I don't get it. It's not clear, it doesn't make any sense to me at all. None.

After that, the game was fine for awhile and I thought, well, one stupid puzzle in a whole big section of game; that's not too bad. But this was the good section.

For the rest of the game, puzzles varied a lot. Some were fine. Some were good ideas badly clued; for example, there was a nice twist on the basic, form these pieces into a continuous path puzzle, but there was a specific order that was poorly clued: you had to get some of it right to see the clue, and this was easily overlooked unless you got several parts right. And there was a part with bird calls that would have been fine with a few pauses added to differentiate the tunes.

Even worse was the insanely high needle-in-a-haystack quotient. "Atlantis II" is a game that thinks you'll really enjoy scrutinizing every pixel of every panoramic view (you can look up down and all around). On the Irish island you have to search for a bunch of little things, one of which I only found with a walkthrough, and couldn't see at all, but could only find by putting my cursor where it was supposed to be. Other places were almost as bad. You should also prepare yourself for a lot of aimless wandering, as there are a couple of areas where you just have to walk around randomly until you find something. And while I'm complaining, I don't think any multi-CD game has the right to force you to always start the game from disk 1. Every time I checked my hint file "Atlantis II" crashed and I had to restart, so I had this problem a lot.

But it gets worse. Once you are past the three worlds and in the endgame there are puzzles that can only be described as evil. The curtain puzzle expects you to have remembered something completely trivial from the beginning of the game. And a puzzle at the very end is so obscure that the UHS file doesn't even bother giving any sort of explanation as to how to figure it out; it just tells you what to do. And yet, there's almost a puzzle there, once again brought down by clueing incompetence. There's also at least one point in the game where it's possible to reach a dead end, something that always pisses me off.

I could go on and on, and believe me I'm tempted, but you get the idea. And it's sad, because there are some good puzzles in the game, and even more potentially good puzzles screwed up by thoughtlessness.

As for the story, well, there isn't much of one and what there is doesn't make much sense. There's a lot of drivel about light and dark and Atlantis and unity and whatnot, but this is your basic loosely-strung-together-puzzles style of adventure game.

If you like really hard games with unreasonable puzzles and a lot of busywork then you might really like "Atlantis II". But it's nothing but a two-star game with four-star ambience.

-- Charles Herold -2000