Rise of the Argonauts Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on February 12th, 2009

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Much more could be written about Rise Of The Argonauts' shortcomings, but the same could be said for its hidden delights. The problem is one of stamina: spend three hours in its company and you will only see the sheep façade; tear Jason off the scenery for long enough to make progress, however, and those sporadic glimpses of the wolf beneath will spur you forward. This is a videogame with the capacity to surprise. It's just a shame so many of them are unpleasant

Not content with robbing people of even the most basic ability to tweak performance, the game also dictates what controls you can use. That's right - whether you're using the mouse-keyboard combo or a gamepad of some sort, the controls cannot be altered from a pre-set selection of default set-ups. It's kind of a shame that nobody involved with this production knew that the ability to redefine keys has been a standard feature of every single home computer game since about 1983, but there we go.

So once you've settled on the least crippling wasd control option and crossed your fingers that the PC you own will be able to run the game at a reasonable pace, you can actually begin. Although you'll probably come to a halt again fairly rapidly if you're one of the many people experiencing random crashes during dialogue sequences. I was one of those lucky not-so-few and battled through a myriad of crashes back to the desktop before stumbling across this handy fix. The .ini file alteration seemed to do the trick, in combination with switching subtitles on and reading ahead so I could click through to the next line of speech before it had a chance to think about crashing. Not an ideal solution, as you can imagine.

In the game, you can only play as Jason but you will gather friends along the way to join you in your quest for the fleece. Famous heroes like Hercules and Achilles will join you as will unfamiliar ones like Pan and Atalanta. In your quest, you can usually take upto 2 other characters with you to each of the game's few areas. I personally went for the strength of Hercules and the bow of Atalanta, but you can pick your own combinations.of course, it depends on who you have in your crew at the time.

Combat is fairly straightforward. It seems to be nothing more than a button-basher, but it does have some lovely moments such as impalements and decapitations. You have a choice of 3 weapons which you can change at will, even in the middle of combat. They are the sword, mace and spear and you'll be given more powerful versions as you progress through the game. Fighting can become repetitive and hit detection is inaccurate at times, but seeing a head flying off an enemy's shoulders in slow motion makes everything seem better.

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