Rise of the Argonauts
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Rise of the Argonauts
The gods are protecting this one
Released two weeks before the end of 2008, Rise of the Argonauts is the first next-generation title for developer Liquid Entertainment whose past work includes real-time strategy titles like Battle Realms and Lord Of The Rings: War of the Ring, both for the PC. In a attempt to bring something new, the developers decided to create a game that revolves around the vast world of ancient Greek mythology by mixing RPG and action adventure elements. Great idea, huge risk...
Gameplay
You play as Jason, who gets ready to marry his long-time love Alceme. Only moments into the wedding, we see Hecate’s fanatical obscure cult the Blacktongues arriving to the palace and attacking everyone nearby, killing Alceme in the process. Filled with anger and sadness, Jason calls upon the Gods and goes in a quest to retrieve the mythical Golden Fleece, which carries the power to undo the death of his true love. If he fails his quest, Alceme’s soul will be lost forever and will never rest in peace.
In the last few years there have been very few decent attempts in creating a game based on ancient mythology. God of War, Spartan Total War and Titan Quest are the notables. Fortunately, Rise of the Argonauts’ storyline is well written and is even more thought further than God of War. Not only players will know more about King Jason but also learn more from other characters like Achilles, Hercules, Pan and King Lycomedes, among other mythical characters. In order to get you more in-depth, the developers have developed a clever leveling system based on “pleasing” four key gods that in return will grant you new powers and upgrades. By achieving certain deeds and quests, you will have to distribute your acquired favor known as Aspects to either Apollo (God of healing and light), Hermes (God of cunning and trickery), Athena (goddess of order, military, strategy and tactical thinking) or Ares (god of battle and courage) which will in return offer their help and empower you during your quest. For example, you will get favor points after killing a certain number of enemies, destroying shields, using certain attacks or simply achieving primary or secondary quests. Then you can either offer the acquired deeds to Apollo, who will bless you with greater resistance and defense, Athena who will grant you greater combat abilities with the spear, or Hermes who will increase your combat skill with your sword while Ares would make your combat inflict greater damage by increasing your strength. Of course, this is just a quick overlook on what the gods can do for you. Favor can also be acquired on how you respond during dialogue depending of the situation and even let some NPC’s do their own thing (watch that Bolo kid…he cracks me up). Those who played lots of Mass Effect will see some similarities with this dialogue system since your responses will be directly linked to a god. Athena will be pleased if you respond rationally. But if you respond aggressively, favor will be going to Ares.
Like I was saying earlier, these deeds can be applied to the gods who will help you mostly to upgrade Jason’s abilities during combat, which is one the coolest thing you will do in Rise of the Argonauts. The combat system is good and responds well no matter which weapon you will be wielding. Each weapon has two types of attacks that will either wound or instantly kill your enemy depending of the button combination you will be using. Jason can also dodge, block, use special attacks or use a God Power that has been acquired during gameplay. Combat can feel stiff for some but actually will push you to use Jason’s abilities to overcome your foes, unlike God of War which is simply a button masher fest. Don’t expect to win your combats if you push buttons for the fun of it. You have been warned. And even if some see it as an “issue”, some people, especially the one with more wit, will actually dig the combat of ROTA even more, which brings me to one of my complaints.
While the game is a hybrid full-fledged RPG and an action game, I would have wished the combat would be more present. There are long periods where you run around making quests but not fighting anyone, making this cool combat system almost non-existent. I can understand what Liquid Entertainment was trying to accomplish by emerging you even more in Ancient Greece by doing secondary quests but more combat would not hurt the game’s appeal like instead of finding a new home to someone or deliver a letter to someone you could go and save someone in trouble, forcing you to battle and in the process, win more favor. Some secondary quests are boring, really boring and even easily avoidable making you concentrate on your primary quest.
But one of biggest issues with Rise of the Argonauts resides in the interface, making the game break in tempo and forces you to do lots of backtracking. As you will notice, the game is hud-less, which means there’s no health bar nor mini-map displayed on screen, giving you a full view of the action. Where is the issue you might say? The fact that there’s no mini-map forces you to pause the game, go to the map, return to the action, pause again if you want to know where’s your next objective and so on. Now, I’m no developer but after playing Fable II and saw what Lionhead did with the sparkling line that tells you where to go, I was wishing Liquid Entertainment would use something similar since back at E3 2008 the game was shown hud-less, thing that sparkled my interest even further in the game. Sadly, this nuisance kept from doing some of the secondary quests available and made me go for the primary quests right away. You will understand that a game like this one offering such a cool leveling system and consequence dialogue a la Mass Effect that can be finished right quickly because of a “pausing-check map” issue is rather disappointing.
Graphics & Sounds
Graphically, the game looks good. The characters render, especially the primary ones, monsters and the environments that you’ll be visiting during your quests are really nice and look great overall. The problem is, the game suffers a lot from lots of framerate drops and texture ripping. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen often but happens enough to make you ask yourself what went wrong. The game runs on the widely popular and powerful Unreal Engine 3 but we don’t understand what kind of issues Liquid Entertainment had with it. Oddly, the framerate drops occur mostly when you’re running around and not during combat, which is really weird if you ask me or anyone.
If the graphics had their ups and downs, the same can be said of the audio. Like I said earlier, the script writing quality was very good but thanks to a less-stellar voice-over work, the quality lost some it’s feathers and that’s a real shame because with the tons of dialogues available, sometimes I didn’t even bothered listening what some characters had to say. Even worst, some of the character’s chatter was literally missing. The long pauses between two characters talking also were kind of annoying. On the positive side, environmental sounds and combat effects were quite nice.
Value
The game has terrific replay value potential but knowing that the graphical and technical hiccups dampers the whole experience, your stay in Ancient Greece will be short and interest in replaying the game can be less present. Gamers, especially those who like RPG’s, tend to persevere more and go over the technical missteps and try to enjoy the game to its full. To those gamers, who have also enjoyed other misunderstood but cool games like Too Human and other Codemasters published-games like Overlord and Jericho, will find Rise of the Argonauts really pleasing in the end. In a world where Fable II’s and Fallout 3’s are stealing all the RPG attention, Rise of the Argonauts might fall in the forgotten game category rather quickly but before doing so, we can’t go and tell you to pass it because you will be missing one the most compelling and interesting storytelling of Greek mythology seen in a while.
Conclusion
Rise of the Argonauts is not a perfect game but it is not as bad as some people have said. We can congratulate Liquid Entertainment for taking the risk to bring this hybrid action-RPG game to the market. Why a risk? Because is not easy to sit between two chairs and please both RPG and action gamers, one will have to be deceived at some point. Still, Rise of the Argonauts will give you some hours of fun and will even teach a thing or two about Greek mythology but that weird feeling of unfinished business and awkwardness will keep popping up during your quest. If you can bypass these annoyances, you will find some way to appreciate the work and the effort put on this game by the developer to please those “I want innovation but not that innovative” whiny gamers. Why this reminds me of Too Human all of a sudden?
Pros
+ Rich in Greek mythology history
+ Dialogue well written
+ Great Soundtrack
+ Easy, groundbreaking and efficient leveling system
+ Great combat system
+ Character renderings are quite nice
+ Dialogue has consequences during gameplay
Cons
- Lots of backtracking
- Not enough combat
- Framerate drops, texture pop-ins, weird camera angles during dialogues
- Odd voice-over, missing chatter
- No mini-map on the screen
Final Verdict
Here's a small guide to help you understand our evaluation of games.
PRESENTATION GRADE
Can be from the game's box to the contents of the booklet, and even the game introduction. (Intro, menus, options, etc)
GRAPHIC GRADE
Up to what point the graphics have been worked on my the developper. The design type, the effort used for textures and environments, as well as animations and framerate.
AUDIO GRADE
Is the soundtrack a good match to the game's style, he ambient sounds keeping with the gameplay and the sound effects clear and convincing?
GAMEPLAY GRADE
Placement of the controls and the inferface that the player with be using during the game.
REPLAY VALUE GRADE
The most important factor in the evaluation of a game. It identifies the lifespan of the game and the fun of coming back again and again.
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