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 by Johnny Liu |
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Nothing scares me more than multiple subtitles. Isn't a title supposed to encapsulate the entirety of a piece of work? Do we really need multiple subtitles to complicate everything? Take this doozy of a title: Atlantis - The Lost Empire: Trial By Fire. That squared subtitle is flat out frightening. Just think: somewhere, some thoughtful executive is already planning to hoist the sequel upon us. Atlantis - The Lost Empire: Ritual Of Gas.
Atlantis turns out to be quite a departure from the Disney norm as it is the company's very first first-person shooter. But if Disney FPS games are going to be like this, I hope it's their last.
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This untraditional Disney movie gets the oh-too-traditional Disney game treatment. Fill the game up with levels that represent key points in the film and surround it with movie footage bookends. Then, get it all out in time to meet the movie's release. Presto!
The game utilizes the Lithtech engine, backbone of such solid, worthwhile games as Shogo and No One Lives Forever. But this detail is entirely moot, given the low level of effort in putting together this game.
The first mission, available for free in specially marked Kellogg's cereal boxes, sends you off as protagonist Milo Thatch on a journey to recover the Shepherd's Journal, the illuminated text that will direct adventurers to the whereabouts of Atlantis. It goes by pretty quickly and is followed by the movie's trailer - so essentially you are playing an advertisement. The second mission follows the course of the movie, journeying to the lost empire of Atlantis.
Levels are heavily mired in fixed-track design. You follow a beeline route to get yourself from Point A to Point B. Along the way, a few environmental disasters occur, like a room filling up with water or a pillar collapsing into lava. Couple this hardcore linearity with no in-game save points and you've got no sense of immersion, only aggravation.
The levels that try for more realistic environments are just poorly designed mazes with inane puzzles. Scattered about are a few vehicle levels, where some game parameters have been changed and some sort of underwater transport has been overlaid in front of you. It's still very bland and not thrilling in the least. There is absolutely no flow or feeling of progression throughout the entire game.
To make things even more worse, most of the levels are barren, with no sense of life or realism or vibrancy at all.
Unlike the typical FPS where blood is standard, Milo gets to "de-rez" his opponents, taking them out of the picture as nonviolently as possible. De-rez is the alternative Disney-fied word for "kill."
Milo has been granted the powers of multicolored zappies. Each of these zappies
of death, or 'de-rezzers', or whatever, have different purposes. One gun shrinks
giant insects, and the goop gun slows your opponents down. Apparently it doesn't
even matter that in the movie Milo was portrayed as a lanky nerd who couldn't
hold a gun let alone a zappie to save his life. Oh well, Disney Interactive
didn't get bogged down with details, so why should we? 
The back of the box states the following concerning one species of in-game opponent: "Gorlocks, Monstrous Creatures who don't fight fair." Damn right they don't fight fair. Instead of an intelligent AI, we've got creatures that take perfectly aimed potshots at you while standing in place. The other brands of enemies just rush straight at you. Squatters and Rushers - whoopee. We should send these guys to the Wizard of Oz.
There's also multiplayer and network support added into the mix, but the poor multiplayer level design, coupled with the prospect of playing the most hardcore 5 year old Atlantis fans isn't particularly inviting. I'll take fragging over de-rezzing any day, thank you very much.
The game obviously tries to duplicate the look of the movie, but the effort largely fails It winds up looking like an older generation FPS. Blame it on the boxy environments, not the texture mapping. One of the deep-sea dive portions involved working your way through a tunnel that trudged on and on in depth-perception-less shades of blue-green. Nauseating.
The above average musical score of the movie is also absent, replaced by stock environmental audio. At least they kept a ton of the original movie dialogue.
One positive that I can eek out is that the game includes at least one original piece of animated footage. Maybe this sequence was scraped from the editing room floor. It's nothing extremely impressive, but if this piques your interest, the footage will probably find its way to some special edition Atlantis DVD.
Did they ever stop to think that maybe a first-person shooter wasn't the best way to portray Atlantis? After all, it is an adventure movie…why not try an adventure game? I'm totally for the idea of a nonviolent FPS, but this one just doesn't work on any level. It's like Catechumen's long lost pagan brother. It doesn't even make a good game for your kid brother or son who's hopped up on Atlantis fever. This is one empire that deserves to stay lost.
| Revolution Report Card |
| D- |
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- Poor level design |
