Atlantis - The Lost Tales
Company : Cyro
Reviewed By : Lonelines

On the Surface this game looks like the ordinary myst style quest game. However, it conceals dark secrets within it.
This game is actually divided to three:
1) The usual get, use talk quest style
2) Solving puzzles (like slide puzzles, and other thinking puzzles)
And Finally... 3) The action segment.
The game's main plot is to find the missing queen and get her highness back to the throne. However, it surprises me that so much conspiracy (i.e. kidnapping the queen, ambushing, soldiers preparing for attack) can actually take place on an Island that gives the impression that it's no more than a mile long. (especially if you can walk from one edge to the other in one day). Another weird part of this game is trying to figure out just how much knowledge these atlantian guys have. I mean: they can fly with a sort of "flying boats" yet they are no better dressed nor equipped as your average Roman guard (with spears and knives), you'd think they'd invent something more sophisticated.
The graphics and animation in this game is very good, the animation is smooth on a full 640x480 screen and the surrounding music is great (the credits claim there is a soundtrack), however, good graphics and animation don't cover up bad game-play.
Let's start with those action sequences. When I buy a quest game, I would really like to play a quest game, if I wanted action, I'd play doom.
The action sequences in this game are WAY beyond good taste and after they start coming on one after the other, you get kind of sick and tired of your clicking frenzy and would like to just save your game and quit. However, saving the game seems to have some problems.
It seems as if programmers these days have just forgotten how to add a simple option called "save game" that would save your game in a specific location (like Abe's Oddworld, and LBA). However in a quest game the lack of a save game option is totally unjustified and mostly needed, the game will automatically save the game in certain places, thus not allowing you to save your game after lets say passing some ANNOYING action sequences.. (The points just keep going down)
So, what do we have? We have action sequences that cannot be saved after passing them, meaning, if you got past the first annoying part of the action sequence and get killed in the second part, you're gonna have to replay the annoying first part again and again, and again, until you reach another save game area of the game. At the end you'll just find all action sequences just unbearable and a pure nuisance rather then fun, since it looks like cryo really tried hard to put more and more traps and action sequences than thoughtful puzzles. (I haven't died so much in a quest game since sierra's quests and even they stopped killing you for peeking at weird holes eventually). This makes the game totally unplayable as a "Real Life" game. (Which means that you cannot start the game and finish it without dying somewhere in the game at least once and thus not true to real life where you can finish the game without dying once and just using pure logic).
Another annoyance of the game is the endgame, no spoilers, but after all the effort I did in this game to finish it, I think I deserved more than that short crummy endgame sequence... I didn't get any satisfaction from finishing the game (and don't tell me there was no more room on the CD you could have cut down on the demos and made it a bit better).
And one last thing...
Is it SO hard to ask that the game LOAD from each of the four CD's and not just the first one so I wouldn't have to SWAP them in the first 5 seconds of play? Or perhaps ask for support on MULTIPLE CD-ROM drives?


Good animation and sound DO NOT compensate for a bad game. And this isn't that a good game. Too many action sequences, no save game option, VERY LINEAR, bad endgame sequence, not much fun.

Only if you really want a game, and you've played everything on the store already and this is the last one left.