Windows Phone Thoughts: Atlantis Redux reviewed

Gameplay
The quality of this game is very high indeed. The graphics are superb, the pre-rendered movies are excellent and the dialogue is very professionally recorded. As we've just seen, the game has simple but effective controls.

A game like this mainly hangs on two things - the storyline and the puzzles. The storyline is pretty good - the game is split into a series of parts and the journey through those parts generally makes sense. It was slightly disconcerting when I suddenly found myself playing the part of a male thief that looked very different from the female archaeologist!


Figure 12: Is this still me?

The storyline is assisted by the various video sequences that are used to carry the story along. Although they are large and what forces the game to be installed onto a storage card, they are worth it - the game definitely would not be the same without them.

The puzzles are, on the whole, logical and do progress in difficulty, although I must confess to getting stuck on the second puzzle in the game and needing help from the developer :-(.

One of my favourite bits was the game's version of snakes and ladders, as shown in Figure 13. The rolling of the dice is beautifully displayed, right down to the shadow it casts over the board. A slight niggle, though, is that you can't save the game at this point - you are stuck here until you win the board game. Since you don't get any warning of this, it can be very frustrating if you get stuck.


Figure 13: Snakes and ladders.

There was one other puzzle, nearer the end of the game, where I just could not figure out the solution. Even now, knowing the answer, I can't mentally join the dots and figure out how you get that answer. Apart from that, though, I enjoyed working through the game and solving the puzzles. Some of them are multi-stage, i.e. you have to solve a few smaller puzzles before you can solve a larger puzzle, which I really enjoy as you have to start mentally juggling more parts to get to the whole.

Unlike other games of this genre, this is definitely one where you'll want a pen and paper to hand - not only to map out the harder parts of the terrain but also to make a note of what at least one character says to you. You'll need it - you'll probably realise why when it is too late! Fortunately, I'd got enough saved places that I didn't have to re-play too much of the game to get the missing information.

Conclusions
This is an excellent game. It may not have the longest gameplay of the available games in this genre, but I found it to be about the right length - somewhere between 15 and 20 hours depending on how good you are at solving the puzzles.

The quality of the graphics has set a standard by which other games will definitely be compared! It will be interesting to see if the promise made at the end of the game is followed through :-).