The Secrets of Atlantis
Score: 75% ESRB: Teen Publisher: The Adventure Company Developer: Atlantis Interactive Media: CD/3 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: The Secrets of Atlantis, from Atlantis Interactive (creators of Atlantis Evolution) is another tale of that lost civilization that has been wrapped up in myths from around the world. For the most part, The Secrets of Atlantis looks good. It uses that first person perspective that really helps to put you into the game. The locations and characters look pretty good, but seem just a little off. It might just be the slightly stylized visuals to give you the feeling of watching an old 1930's film, but either the colors or the appearance don't look quite right. This isn't really an issue because it doesn't take long for you to get used to the old-time feel of the game and just accept it. Audio, on the other hand, seemed to have some issues. I found the sound to pop a lot and come through my speakers rather harshly. Thinking it was all a matter of sound levels, I went into the Options and fiddled with the various slide bars for a half hour or so, but to no avail. In the end, I just sucked it up and kept playing through the game.
Gameplay: The Secrets of Atlantis takes you back to the 1930's and onto the Hindenburg, the largest airship to come out of the Zeppelin corporation. Your character happens to be one of the engineers who helped design this massive ship, Howard Brooks, and on a return flight between Germany and New York, a radical sect hijacks the ship and attempts to take a supposedly precious heirloom from our hero. This group believes that Howard has the key to discovering the location and history of Atlantis, and now he will travel from New York to Mesopotamia in order to solve the mystery himself. As you would expect from a game of this style, there is a lot of exploration involved and you get to see plenty of locations. A good bit of the puzzles are intuitive and most established adventure-gamers should be able to work through them with a good bit of effort. Unfortunately, there are a few puzzles that increase this game's annoyance level because of their difficulty. Those particular puzzles typically involve going back over the areas you've been through and pixel-hunting every screen to see what items you didn't pick up or what drawers you didn't open, then going back to the puzzle and trying everything in your inventory, something that is both tiring and time-consuming.
Difficulty: The Secrets of Atlantis' puzzles are about average. The hardest part of the game seems to be figuring out exactly what you should be doing next. I seemed to be finding myself wandering all around the available screens trying to find out what clickable pixel I might have missed so I can progress, rather than just going directly to the next task. Basically it came down to not being aware of where I needed to go next throughout most of the game. For instance, at the very beginning, your character is knocked on the head and you wake up on an apparently empty Hindenburg. You aren't told where you need to go or even what you need to do. After some exploring, you will find yourself in the engine room with a leaky hydrogen container. So you need to shut off the one that's messed up. Unfortunately, figuring out exactly how to fix the steaming pipes is a bit of a headache and the solution doesn't seem very intuitive and requires a good bit of out-of-the-box thinking.
Game Mechanics: The Secrets of Atlantis' controls are pretty standard as far as point-and-click adventure games are concerned. It has a few oddities that take a little getting used to, and it's hard to tell if it's way of handling these cases is better or worse than the standard. The most prominent of these differences is how you use items in your inventory with items in the world. When you hover over an item of interest, your cursor displays a gear. You can then right click to pull up your inventory and select an item and then click on the thing you wish to use it with. This is pretty standard, except that you are also allowed walk around with this item in your hand. This might sound good, except that it makes it harder to see exactly what you can do since your icon is changed to reflect the fact that you are holding this tool. Overall, The Secrets of Atlantis has just the right feel and an intriguing story to make most adventure gamers trek through some of its bigger problems, but if you are only a mild fan of the genre, then you might want to pass this one up.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Minimum System Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista, 1.0 GHz or higher CPU, 256 MB RAM, 2 GB Hard Disk space, DirectX compatible sound card, 16x CD-ROM, 32 MB 3D Accelerated video card, DirectX 9.0c   Test System: Alienware Aurora m9700 Laptop, Windows XP Professional, AMD Turion 64 Mobile 2.41 GHz, 2 GB Ram, Duel NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 256MB Video Cards, DirectX 9.0c
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