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Let me start by saying that this sentence right here is the last place in this review you will see the word "game", because this is anything but.
Archon III is not a part of the Archon trilogy. If anything, it is sacrilege to the name "Archon". Despite what the credits say, Anne Westfall, Jon Freeman and Paul Reiche IV had nothing to do with the creation of this steaming pile of code. If anything, just looking at this monstrosity would give them a heart attack. This was made by two or three people in their garage who decided, "Hey, let's make something we can pass off as Archon!" If you can muster up the courage to play through this thing, you'll easily be able to see why. First hint - take a look at the monster icons. You tell me what's wrong with them.
Unlike the real Archons, there is little difference between any of the creatures you can summon. Their "element" has absolutely no bearing on play itself. The only thing you'll notice is that as you move further down the list, they have a little more life. That's it. Oh yeah, the one at the way end, the one named "Exciter", is your main character for this prolonged torture session. He dies, you lose.
Moving around the board is just as ridiculous. In this complete waste of valuable disk space, there is a corridor running around the edge of the "map", and that's the only places your monsters can move. How far you can move on a turn is directly related to how much life the monster has left. To make matters worse, moving into a wall takes away from your move total for the turn.
You will notice that there are four "power points" in the corners of the map. No, you cannot win this time around by controlling them all, because you can only have one monster on the map at a time. If you move onto one and press the fire button, you can cast a spell. Like in the real Archons, they're self explanatory. Only here, they're just this side of useless. Casting spells weakens your Exciter, and as you will read in just a little bit, that's a very bad thing.
Okay, little bit over. Onto combat, though I'm extremely hesitant to call it actual "combat". Each and every single monster has the exact same "attack", a lame aura that'll only hurt someone if you are right on top of them, and does the exact same amount of damage regardless of which monster you are using. You're probably thinking to yourself right now, "Hey, that's a strategy element right there!" Only if your definition of strategy is whoever presses and holds down the fire button first wins. Yes, you read that correctly. If both monsters have about the same amount of life, if you can press the fire button first, you will win 99% of all the combats. If your monster's life is lower by any real amount, forget winning the battle. By the way, let me just take the time to point out that there's no way you can get revenge for losing, because the surviving monster is automatically teleported home safely.
Onto the fun part. Now let's say the idea that you actually wanted to try to win crept into your head. It won't happen, but let's just say it did. There's only one way to win, and I mentioned it earlier; kill your opponent's Exciter. Note that once you bring out your Exciter, his is automatically called out as well, and you can't go back on that choice. Not that you'd want to, because at this point this exercise in futility has gone on for too long. Go into combat, fight it out like you normally do, winner wins, you get a little hurrah screen, and you can start from the top if you wanted to. What the winner wins, I don't know.
What I DO know is that there's a couple of "working" copies floating around out there. By "working", I mean that there's a serious flaw somewhere that'll end the suffering prematurely. Such as, if you cast a spell, you automatically lose as soon as the final battle starts. Or as soon as the final battle is over, the whole thing crashes and returns you to the prompt. It's only a few seconds of relief, but hey, take what you can get.
The only redeeming quality about this whole thing is that you can delete the file off your harddrive and reclaim the disk space for something more valuable, like disk errors. Download this only if you dare. But if your computer hates you for the rest of your life for corrupting it with this garbage, don't say I didn't warn you.
Downloads: Music
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| GRAPHICS - 1/10 |
Wow. They managed to make stars twinkle. Woo hoo.
| | SOUND - 1/10 |
Personally, I'm surprised they even managed to come up with something that sounded like real music.
| | PLAYABILITY - 1/10 |
There's no skill or strategy involved. At all. I'm not kidding.
| | OVERALL - 1/10 |
It's really a -32766, but they won't let my score go that low.
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; "Click to zoom!")
