Curse of Atlantis: Thorgal's Quest
Score: 85% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: The Adventure Company Developer: Angel Studios Media: CD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: A popular comic book series from across the ocean, particularly in France, has made its debut in video games. Curse of Atlantis: Thorgal's Quest, a point-and-click adventure, is an adaptation of the comic book series called Thorgal that follows a Viking by the name of Thorgal Aegirsson and his voyages across the ancient world. The scenery in Curse of Atlantis is beautiful and full of detail, although it is completely static. It gives the impression that you are merely walking through a bitmap. Thorgal, and the characters you encounter while traveling, are pretty much the only things moving in the scenes. While this does allow you to focus on the main events of the game, it is a little eerie to travel through a dense and dark forest and not see some form of life or movement in the background. There are also several cut scenes in the game that are done very well and show a lot of the detail of Thorgal's world. The music is perfect for the game. When the time comes for one of Thorgal's Quest's action events, the music picks up and gets you ready to take out the enemy in whatever way you can, whether it is making him run off the side of a building or firing an arrow to drop some object on his head. The voices and sound effects are pretty good as well, and as a plus, the game has a subtitle option.
Gameplay: Curse of Atlantis: Thorgal's Quest starts you off stranded due to a massive storm on an island far away from home. Early in the game, Thorgal meets an old soothsayer by the name of Noral. Noral presents a mirror that shows Thorgal killing his own son, Jolan, in the near future. You talk with Noral, and the two of you come to the conclusion that someone, one of Thorgal's many enemies from his past, must be appearing as the Viking to gain the boy's trust. Thorgal becomes determined to head home and stop this tragedy from happening. But first, he must get off of the island. As Thorgal, you will travel all over the island, into a place called 'Between Two Worlds' and even across time. While on this journey, you learn of Thorgal's past and about his family history along with his ties to the lost continent of Atlantis. As you complete puzzles, the game builds a comic book out of Thorgal's adventure. This comic can be viewed at anytime, and adds some insight into Thorgal's past adventures. This is good if you haven't read the comics and are a little confused as to why some of the characters know the Viking. Although before I found out about the comic series, I was a little confused and couldn't figure out if this game was a sequel or if there was a prequel in the planning. The point is, you don't need to know Thorgal's back-story to win the game - I didn't.
Difficulty: Besides a couple of bugs that forced me to restart from my last save, like guys running off the sides of buildings and not actually falling, I was able to move along at a pretty steady pace. Overall the puzzles of Curse of Atlantis: Thorgal's Quest are easy to solve and figure out, if you can find the items you need, that is. There are a couple of times that I found myself completely stumped, and it was usually because I overlooked an object or some small detail. There are three or four puzzles that you need to solve within a certain amount of time, as well as a puzzle or two that requires luck. Except maybe for these luck puzzles, if you know what items you need and how to use them, you will be able to beat the game in about an hour easily.
Game Mechanics: Point-and-Click, that's about it as far as the control system of Curse of Atlantis: Thorgal's Quest is concerned. When your cursor finds an 'item of interest,' that item will light up and the cursor will spin. To pick up the item, provided you can that is, just click it. And when the time comes for you to use your bow and arrow, you need to be within range of your target, and once the cursor is over the target, it changes to a circle. This means you can fire, and except for a couple of cases, you will hit the desired area. Like I said above, there are a couple of glitches in the game that can be annoying. There are also a couple of times when I felt that there was absolutely nothing drawing my attention to an object so that I knew that there was something I could do with it - these items could very well have been part of the static scenery. Besides these problems, it was an enjoyable game. I would recommend it to anyone who is into adventure games, but if you don't usually go after this type, then don't go out of your way.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Minimum System Requirements: Windows 98 or better; 450 MHz Pentium II or better; 64 MB RAM; 12X CD-ROM; 16 MB DirectX Compatible 3D Video Card; DirectX Compatible Sound Card; Subtitle Option available   Test System: Toshiba Satellite series laptop; Windows XP Home Ed.; 2.0 GHz Celeron; 512 MB RAM; 24X DVD/CD ROM; 32 MB 3D accelerator
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