Archon is a classic masterpiece, created out of a vision of chess pieces having the ability to 'fight back'. It is a completely unique game with a wonderful mix of action and strategy. Clearly 'labor of love', creation with inspiration, something where everything just clicked perfectly. It was conversely converted to many platforms, and enjoyed a great success, and it's just as fun to play now, as it ever was. You can't be a C64 or Atari computer owner and not have Archon in your collection.
Archon II: Adept is a crappy attempt at riding on the success of Archon. Written clearly without vision, or inspiration - just dollar signs gleaming in the eyes.
Another rehash-for-cash, if you will.
Everything that was good and right in the original, is bad and wrong here
The BALANCE and SIMPLICITY of the original are just .. gone. The original was simple, and yet it was packed with options and possibilities, and you had to use cunning strategies to win. As the end result, the matches were epic, exciting, intense and completely satisfying, especially against human beings.
And if you lost, you could only blame yourself - the game mechanics could never be faulted.
But what happened here? You can just suddenly END THE WHOLE GAME by choosing the 'Armageddon' option! That was NEVER a possibility in the original - you just HAD to play through and complete the game 'legitimately', with hard work and cunning.
Here, with all these 'summoned creatures' (which do not feel like authentic, genuine pieces of the original, because they are just some summoned lowly creatures, not actual, living beings), things are a hectic mess, and there's no real strategy.
The element you happen to have you creatures on, dictate only what kind of backgrounds you get when fighting - a good idea to vary the backgrounds, but HOW they did it, is just not .. fun.
What's the point of a water, fire or air background, when you can't really hide behind anything anymore? The backgrounds might just as well be completely empty - those elements have mostly a decorative purpose (besides being able to hurt you or slow you down).
It completely changes the fight dynamics - for the worse! And those silly car-things are so useless (like many others). Put two of them to fight against each other, and the fight will NEVER end. This shouldn't be possible, and in the original, only a Phoenix + Shapeshifter fight comes close (but even THAT ended at some point, because energy was always drained, never gained in a fight).
Guiding the discs is frustratingly difficult, and not intuitive - they don't feel like they are under your control, it feels like you are constantly FIGHTING to GET them under your control, and still they never do exactly what you wanted them to. This never happened in the original, where everything you do, happens exactly like you want it to, if you have a good joystick.
In the original, you feel 100% in control, and that control is tight, solid and perfect.
Here, the control is slipping and weird, and you have no idea what's going on half of the time.
And if you happen to lose a summoned entity, do you really care, when you can just summon another one? All you REALLY lost was some .. energy. So the fights are not only frustrating and unbalanced, they are also completely meaningless.
The magic points used to be a clever OPTION to utilize - here they are a mundane JOB you have to constantly work at in order to be able to play properly.
Adept? What a silly name. Archon never needed a subtitle. Now it has one, like all the crappy movies and games of the modern era - perhaps this was foreshadowing the era of stupidity. (Btw, had they made a third one, they would have had the "Rambo / First Blood"-naming problem; is it going to be called "Adept II" or "Archon III" or what? Or both? "Archon III: Adept II: The Conjurer"? Subtitle names are the epitome of stupidity.)
Did the makers of the game even know what 'adept' really means as a spiritual concept?
Even if you are an actual, spiritual adept, the random nature of the game might just make you lose. It's too easy to fail here without it ever being your own fault, and that is a showstopper for me.
Making something more complicated and adding stuff to it doesn't equal 'better' - in fact, it equals 'worse'. Like in "Great American Cross-Country Race" (Atari 2600 Enduro is a thousand times better), the authors should have listened to the old saying: "LESS IS MORE!"
What's with the ugly black squares around the characters? That NEVER happened in the original (except when the background was supposed to be black, and then it was appropriate). It really makes it look like character-based crap instead of the beings they are supposed to represent (though, instead of exciting mythological creatures, we get "generic adepts that don't look like anything much"). It's made worse by the useless animation of the fire and water elements - why isn't air or ground animated? In Boulder Dash, they at least circumvented this problem by making the boulders 'almost square' and having the ground tile have darker corners. (Many later games neglected to utilize this trick, and consequently their 'round rocks' look awful with their black borders)
http://www.lemon64.com/games/screenshots/full/b/boulder_dash_03.gif
But here, it sticks out like a sore thumb (do sore thumbs really stick out? I mean, do you immediately notice, when someone has a sore thumb? Not a bleeding one, not an injured one, not a wounded one, but .. just .. sore?), breaks the immersion and looks ugly.
Also, most of the summoned entities are useless and badly balanced. They don't shoot most of the time (I guess that would have been too much fun), they just either 'drive fast' or 'generate a force field' or 'imitate the useless phoenix from Archon' or.. geez, give me something that shoots, doggone it! The original game had plenty of those, and only a couple of useless characters (besides the pawns, which were just a nuisance).
The whole 'power balance act' was a really stupid idea. It may have been a cool idea on paper, not to just drain power, but also gain power (which means some fights will never end, you morons), but in practice and playability-wise - it's a DISASTER.
The computer 'adepts' with their discs are way too good, they kill you instantly, no matter where you are, without having time to orientate yourself to the surroundings or the environment. Instant death = not fun.
This also never happened in the original.
Why are there multiple adepts? Shouldn't this game be called: "Adepts: Archon II", then? I mean, why call it "Adept", when there are multiple "adeptS" in the game? So if there was any mystery about the name, it's totally mundanized by simply having the adepts right there, when the game starts. How boring! At least build in some mystery, let those dudes be some kind of novices, and the adept be the one that wins the game, or perhaps you could build yourself INTO an adept and then have a kind of clash of the titans (in the style of 'armageddon').
If becoming 'the adept' was a goal in this game, the name would be more apt, and the game more interesting.
This game also crashes way too easily, the original never does (just when I was trying to 'banish' someone, the game crashed. Thanks a lot. And I was playing with my Commodore 128, loaded the game from my old diskette from the 1980s, so it's not any emulator issue).
The sound effects are either copies from the original, or horrifying ear-torture. What happened to the interesting and exciting teleport sound? Now it's this oddly broken-rhytmic, unpleasant blirp-blorp-sound, when before there was a feeling of something cool and magical actually happening and going forward. This feels like a car that's not running too well, and keeps stopping.
The fact that you have to use the summon-spell a lot, kills the whole point of trying to eradicate the opponent's pieces (not to mention the 'magical excitement' of using magic. They can always just summon more of them. And then it becomes a boring and mundane game of gathering energy from the 'magic points' (might as well be 'resource wells' in this game).
What, here? How did they think this mess would be than the clarity of the original? And if they didn't, why make it? Yeah. Money, of course.
Also, drawing of the screen is slower, so you have to contantly wait for it to draw, draw and re-draw. It tediously draws or 'undraws' the screen one element at a time - groan! Tedious and boring!
Casting a spell used to be an event! It was exciting to see "Sorcerer is casting a spell!". Now it's mundane, it happens all the time, and it's something you MUST do constantly.
Mystery and magic killed again, mundane and tedium brought in their stead.
Then there's the added, unnecessary complexities, like that the spells require energy. Why the heck would they do that? It only brings more stress and tedium, and detracts from the FUN aspect. So now you have to keep a constant eye on the energy levels as well as trying to do multiple other difficult things at once, while remembering how much energy you have and fitting everything accordingly.
Yet, any fight can end in a second, when the computer adept
so 'adeptly' flings its discs! The whole game can also become to an abrupt conclusion if the opponent decides to waste all your 'strategy effort' and simply conjures the APOCALYPSE-spell.
The energy balance is just a pain in the buttocks.
Imprison someone, and now you have a constant energy drain - so you have to liberate them sooner or later. What's the point, then?
The original did this so much better. No worrying about energy levels or gathering resources or any of that jazz - just get on with it and play!
Basically, everything is about energy in this game - the pieces do not matter as much. When you kill a summoned entity, the opponent loses energy, though they can re-summon the entity.
So basically what you killed was not a valuable piece that the opponent lost forever (a real loss), but just some .. energy. Just a value, a number, an amount of something.
That is boring, that's like handling money, resources or stock market.
Now, there are accountant-types out there who get a kick and thrill out of that stuff, but it does not belong to a fun computer or video game!
Besides, even the resource gathering gameplay can be done in a fun way, like Warcraft II showed us a long time ago (Starcraft was a bit more tedious).
Another thing that brings the atmosphere down is that four of the summoned creatures are the same for both sides! What's up with that? Did they run out of imagination, memory, or something? That never happened in the original - they were all different and unique.
And what's with the rehashes anyway - Firebird is just a crappier version of Phoenix (that was at least majestic, as useless as it was), and some of the others are just carbon copies of the original's pieces. Gorgon shoots like Djinn, the Wraith has a force field like Banshee, etc.
Besides, how DILUTED is it to put "Chaos vs. Order"? With "Light and Dark" there was at least a real contrast (as unrealistic as that is, because dark is only absence / small amount of light, and light always banishes darkness instantly, so there is never a contest).
But 'Chaos' and 'Order' are just pretty boring concents for a game. So your room looks chaotic, or everything is in order - so what? Who cares? There can be order in chaos, or chaos in order, too. Creative Chaos is the norm in the Universe, but humans always want to put everything in tight order. Still, there's order in that chaos.. and chaos in the order the humans strive to achieve. But that doesn't make an interesting concept for a GAME!
The same goes for the colors chosen - yellow is always a good color to choose, but.. cyan? Cyan and yellow? Both are relatively bright colors, and cyan is almost grey, so it has no real substance. Blue, however, is a dark color, and forms a GREAT contrast to yellow in the original! Cyan and Yellow is like putting two slightly different breeds of dogs to fight each other, when Blue and Yellow is like putting a dog and a cat to fight each other.
As a sidenote, why so many "demons"? Why not stick with the magical mythology - why just make everything more boring and hellish by just making so many 'demons'? What is this game trying to say to us?
It's interesting that they tried something new, but when they deviated from the original inspiration and vision ("Let's make a chess-game, where the pieces can actually have a chance even if a more powerful piece attacks a weaker one"), and tried to fabricate something ON THEIR OWN, it all fell apart.
They were clearly competent programmers, but as game designers without a vision - they chew more than they could swallow.
Archon II: Adept's gameplay is broken, and it cannot be fixed, because it was designed that way.
Maybe one day there will be a good 'Archon expansion' - taking the playability from the original Archon-game, but expanding it into a Moonstone-type scenery, instead of a chessboard.
(Swords of Twilight is not quite it)
Archon II: Adept only provides the player with endless frustration, nothing much more. It's clearly motivated only by greed for more money, not by any genuine creative inspiration to create a great game or manifest a cool concept.
Stick with the original, it's at least based on a vision, and created with inspiration.
Manual
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