Screenshots :.
Rise of the Argonauts
360
Jay
12-02-2009
"Greetings, slightly generic lead character!"
"Fat Friends."
"Well that's a nice... shield."
RPG's and hack-n-slash combine to bring us a new spin on the ol' Greek mythology saga from Liquid Entertainment – Rise of the Argonauts. You start the game from Jason's perspective, having your missus killed by a Black Tongue, a clan of mental tattoo covered assassins who've been trying to pop her clogs for some time. You, being the arrogant duty-filled Argonaut that you are, can't accept that this is the will of the Gods and so set about to bring her back, hopefully in time for her to still have all the bits in the right places.
After a slightly long-winded introduction on the basics of combat where Jason runs around fending off the remaining baddies while thieving a variety of weapons for you (we wouldn't want you to get bored with just the one now would we?) to start thwacking things with all the guile and grace of an enraged bull and a year's supply of speed. That is to say that the hack-n-slash element of the game is the most prominent and deftly sets-to showing the player how to mash buttons like you've never mashed them before. Don't worry about combos, they're for pansies – just keep mashing until your thumb falls off from RSI induced leprosy.
Yes, you're allowed to power your attacks using and abusing the God's by sending them your deeds *cough* achievements *cough* thus introducing you to the RPG element of the game. Using one of the 4 God's you seem to find worthy of your time, you can dedicate these deeds, picked up randomly via text prompts through the game and certain side quests, to gain attribute points to spend on these upgrades. Each God has a specialised tree of upgrades to choose from, spending your points as you see fit. These skills would be extremely useful if you could tell when you had one available, or if they responded well to your command of “please use now”, but that rarely seems to be the case. Not that it matters, for the length of time I spent with this title, I rarely felt the need.
Which leads nicely into the HUD, which doesn't exist. In what seems more favourable these days, rather than showing how much health, mana, savoury snack products etc you have at your disposal, they've gone for the whole “you're almost dead” blur mode, which other than performing the same effect as drinking 3 bottles of Vodka and sitting on a Waltzer for an hour, except performing such action on your eyes, it actually doesn't help a great deal. It would be great to know how bad the situation is without an on-off blur-o-matic mode throwing a vomit chunk of confusing into the mix.
Still, these moments don't happen that often as you still have to make your way through a plethora of dialogue and a free-roaming environment that indeed makes you roam freely in a set direction, while taking an age to get to your destination with a lack of any decent transport. So throwing up occasionally during combat is a welcome change from an environment which has about as much fun provided as chewing bees.
Although in saying all that, there is humour to be found if you simply watch some of the AI in this game flail themselves around the virtual stage as puppets in some sort of morbid, degenerative diseased filled play. Or listen to some of the voice acting, as I'm fairly certain that Ares used to be a Power Ranger before he got to Greece.
About 3 hours into the game I found myself having no real wish to win a battle, if it wasn't for the fact that of course I'd have to repeat a section. But, after all this I concluded that there are 2 saving graces to this game. One is the music, which has been scored really nicely all the way from the title screen through to...well, wherever your patience takes you and secondly the story itself. Greek mythology is a bloody fantastic set of stories to base your game on and it's been done pretty well this time around. Bumping into familiar characters and seeing peoples takes on their job roll or appearance always has me intrigued.
Generally speaking it's a shame that Rise of the Argonauts went the way it did, there was a great deal of potential crammed into a production that ultimately seemed rushed. Even the graphics could've used a next-gen polish to bring it out of the last-gen pool.
After a slightly long-winded introduction on the basics of combat where Jason runs around fending off the remaining baddies while thieving a variety of weapons for you (we wouldn't want you to get bored with just the one now would we?) to start thwacking things with all the guile and grace of an enraged bull and a year's supply of speed. That is to say that the hack-n-slash element of the game is the most prominent and deftly sets-to showing the player how to mash buttons like you've never mashed them before. Don't worry about combos, they're for pansies – just keep mashing until your thumb falls off from RSI induced leprosy.
Yes, you're allowed to power your attacks using and abusing the God's by sending them your deeds *cough* achievements *cough* thus introducing you to the RPG element of the game. Using one of the 4 God's you seem to find worthy of your time, you can dedicate these deeds, picked up randomly via text prompts through the game and certain side quests, to gain attribute points to spend on these upgrades. Each God has a specialised tree of upgrades to choose from, spending your points as you see fit. These skills would be extremely useful if you could tell when you had one available, or if they responded well to your command of “please use now”, but that rarely seems to be the case. Not that it matters, for the length of time I spent with this title, I rarely felt the need.
Which leads nicely into the HUD, which doesn't exist. In what seems more favourable these days, rather than showing how much health, mana, savoury snack products etc you have at your disposal, they've gone for the whole “you're almost dead” blur mode, which other than performing the same effect as drinking 3 bottles of Vodka and sitting on a Waltzer for an hour, except performing such action on your eyes, it actually doesn't help a great deal. It would be great to know how bad the situation is without an on-off blur-o-matic mode throwing a vomit chunk of confusing into the mix.
Still, these moments don't happen that often as you still have to make your way through a plethora of dialogue and a free-roaming environment that indeed makes you roam freely in a set direction, while taking an age to get to your destination with a lack of any decent transport. So throwing up occasionally during combat is a welcome change from an environment which has about as much fun provided as chewing bees.
Although in saying all that, there is humour to be found if you simply watch some of the AI in this game flail themselves around the virtual stage as puppets in some sort of morbid, degenerative diseased filled play. Or listen to some of the voice acting, as I'm fairly certain that Ares used to be a Power Ranger before he got to Greece.
About 3 hours into the game I found myself having no real wish to win a battle, if it wasn't for the fact that of course I'd have to repeat a section. But, after all this I concluded that there are 2 saving graces to this game. One is the music, which has been scored really nicely all the way from the title screen through to...well, wherever your patience takes you and secondly the story itself. Greek mythology is a bloody fantastic set of stories to base your game on and it's been done pretty well this time around. Bumping into familiar characters and seeing peoples takes on their job roll or appearance always has me intrigued.
Generally speaking it's a shame that Rise of the Argonauts went the way it did, there was a great deal of potential crammed into a production that ultimately seemed rushed. Even the graphics could've used a next-gen polish to bring it out of the last-gen pool.
4/10