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Rise of the Argonauts

The Hunt For Golden Fleece

In theory, Rise of the Argonauts tells a grand tale of RPG-style adventure as Jason and his shipmates set sail on Argo to find the Golden Fleece. In practice Jason's adventures proceed like this; Talk to the captain and pick your destination from a very short list, instantly warp to the destination island, talk to locals, figure out the odd puzzle, do some quests, kill a bunch of bad guys, kill a boss, talk some more, kill some more bad guys, kill epic boss in heavily pre-scripted battle, return to Argo, repeat. RPG elements are very light. Sure, there is plenty of chatting with characters but that's about it - at times you could mistake the game for a hack & slash action title with unusually high amount of talking to interrupt the flow of the game.

Argo - the legendary ship of the Argonauts

Aspect UI allows you to dedicate your deeds for some spiffy bonuses and abilities.

So how about the RPG part? For character development you complete deeds (tasks similar to achievements) which you then dedicate to the deity of your choice - Ares, Apollo, Athena or Hermes. Each deity has his own tree of bonuses and special abilities that you unlock by dedicating deeds. You can either go all out on one god or spread out your deeds to multiple gods. There is no way to "re-spec" your choices but the game seems to dish out deeds like candy so small errors in deed allocation don't feel too harmful.

Weapons and armor come only in the form of special items you receive as the story progresses and none have any visible stats of any kind. You only carry what you wear - one sword, one mace, one spear and one set of armor. When you equip a new item, the old one gets sent to you ship. You can switch the weapons you carry at Argo if you for some reason wish to return to an earlier weapon.

Got a new weapon - want to wield it or keep using your old one?

Hercules hovering around - the supporting characters are there, but they don't really matter.

Your shipmates have no inventory or items to manage and in many other ways they also feel a bit like Elika in the recent Prince of Persia game - they hover around, talk a bit and participate in battles doing their own thing on autopilot and... that's it. You never really feel for them or get the sense that they truly matter.

Hack'n'Slash

Being action-oriented isn't necessarily a bad thing - there are plenty of good examples. It's all boils down to the quality of action. Rise of the Argonauts is rated M for a reason - critical hits can sever limbs and chop enemies in half. The good points sadly end there. In theory you can combine different attacks and switch weapons on the fly for spectacular effects. In practice the combat tends to degrade into button mashing and Jason has the tendency to swing air even when you think you are in range of the enemy. Special god powers spice up the combat a bit but they can be used so rarely that they tend not to be a factor in normal combat.

Combat animations tend to be passable but characters have a tendency to slide around from time to time. It feels like there is some real character model physics going on, but it's mixed with pre-canned combat animations, giving you a slightly rigid feel.

Bashing some buttons to chop up some random monsters.

Rise of the Argonauts version of Medusa setting up the scene for a boss battle.

Major boss fights are somewhat more complex and tend to involve your shipmates a bit more and the battle design is suitably epic (here comes the "God of War"-part) but in retrospect it's easy to figure out the simple strategy that is needed and then it's all about button mashing with the suitable tactic tossed in until the big guy keels over. These battles are probably the most interesting parts of the whole game but that ain't saying much.

User Interface Fail

Combat shows the biggest "bad design" decisions of the game. Rise of the Argonauts has basically no HUD at all. You can add in a health bar for yourself and a simple four-icon menu for the god powers, but that's it. The only way to figure out when an enemy is going to die is to whack him until he finally croaks. I can fully understand the immersive qualities of "no user interface elements" school of design, but in practice it rarely ever works. Here it's clear that it didn't work as the game ends up using several UI elements. Once you cross that line, leaving out other elements just so you can say your UI is "minimalistic" is just silly.

On a related note, the UI has no map or compass of any kind. There is a map, but to access it you first have to pause the game and then wait for the menu to fade in and pick "map" from it. As some of the areas have multiple routes it's extremely easy to get lost and the only way to ensure you are going the right way is to constantly break the flow of the game by fiddling with the poorly implemented pause menu. If you insist that your map has to be in the pause menu, what's wrong with the GTA IV approach? If 95% of the time the reason to access the pause menu is to view the map, the map should be right there, on the pause menu and not under a separate selection! This is UI design 101 stuff, not rocket science.

Also, for a game that has tons of chatting and multiple-choice dialogue options its bizzarre that the dialogue text is displayed using large monospaced font, giving the whole thing a distinctively ancient feel - a bit like old 8-bit console games with their fixed width fonts. I'm honestly amazed with the font choice - I'm sure it is fine to ensure readability on the Xbox 360 when the game is played using a standard-definition television but on the PC it looks horribly amateurish.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Visuals, PerformancePage 4: Summary, Scores

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