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Rise of the Argonauts

Mythical Visuals

Visuals are probably the strongest aspect of the game and at times Rise of the Argonauts looks outright beautiful. Then you walk around a corner and see bits that look like they escaped from a rough placeholder of a level. Areas are small and you are constantly running around narrow corridors regardless of the landscape. This leads to the dreaded feel of playing in a bunch of movie sets - everything is prepared and set up for your team and the story. It is rare to see a game that can completely avoid this issue but Rise of the Argonauts doesn't even try.

At times the scenery can be impressive...

...but the good bits are "balanced out" by some terrible art and animation.

Animation is mostly passable and the main characters look acceptable. Same can't be said about many of the other characters. Lip sync ranges from passable to terrible and adds to the general feeling of amateurish and unpolished product.

Performance

The performance is what you'd expect from an unoptimized Xbox 360 port of an Unreal Engine 3 game, with one small surprise; the only graphical option in-game is a resolution switch - and at a reasonable resolution, the practical hardware required is quite high. In a way this reminds me of Stranglehold - it pulled off a very similar move of "no graphics options" and in the same way you need a PC that can handle your typical Xbox 360 port at high settings - a very fast single core CPU or a dual core CPU coupled with a reasonably fast Shader Model 3.0-compatible card.

But the box claims the game runs on practically any SM3.0 card. This puzzled me for a moment, but then I noticed that the developers have hidden a switch for the low end systems - there is a separate "low" shortcut that gets installed to your start menu. It starts the game with minimal settings. Short of providing a set of cryptic command line options, it is probably the most amateurish way to present graphics options. The only real effect of the "low" shortcut appears to be the removal of all lighting effects and some shaders from the game - turning already flat-looking visuals worse. On the other hand, low mode allows you to actually play the game at something closing in on the listed minimum specifications.

Using "low" shortcut - playable on the YouGamers minimum system.

Normal game - playable on the YouGamers recommended system.

Unfortunately even this low mode isn't quite playable on the listed minimum unless you drag the resolution way down. In comparison, YouGamers minimum system (Dual core CPU and GeForce 7900GS or Radeon X1800 series card) manages the low mode well enough even at 1280x1024. For the normal mode, you need a fairly modern card as reflected by the YouGamers recommended system, and even on a system like that you will get stuttering from time to time. The stutters are related to your location in the game, so it appears that while the play area is split into numerous sections separated by loading screens, the game also streams some content on the fly - poorly - causing massive framerate dips.

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

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