Rise of the Argonauts Review
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If anything, ROTA was meant to be a Bioware-inspired RPG. For the vast majority of the game you're traipsing around the enormous, bland, empty locations occasionally dialogue-skipping your way through another ghastly conversation, until you, the king, are asked to deliver someone's pie or something. Except you're not really gathering quests, you're just building up a list of destinations you have to lethargically jog toward, desperately hoping for a fight along the way. The lengthy opening, in Iolcus, defies previously known boundaries for tiresome time-wasting. After being forced to run back and forth through the castle, making moral decisions of no consequence whatsoever, you're then charged with sauntering your kingly arse down to the docks were your new boat, the Argo, is waiting. Get there and a woman asks you if you can give a message to someone back in the castle, and an old man tells you his son is missing.
So in case any of it is critical to the main plot you slog all the way back up again, Hercules faffing around behind you, talk to people, and then all the way back down, getting spun around every step of the way. The map is available through the options menu, which after appearing takes an agonising couple of seconds before it will let you select anything. There's no mini-map, nor any compass, which makes the constant 180 turns in the corridors each city is made up of incessantly confusing and disorientating. This is not helped by Jason's companions apparently on a sponsored attempt to perform non-stop Marx Bros routines by wedging themselves into every doorway and corridor such that you can't get past them. Because oh boy, does this game like clipping.
