When you mention Jason and the Argonauts to anyone over the age of 20, they instantly think back and remember Ray Harryhausen’s bizarre – but ridiculously advanced for the time – animated skeletons from the 1963 movie of the same name. The story that the movie takes on is a well-known one, involving Jason and his search for the Golden Fleece – and with Rise of the Argonauts, Liquid Entertainment haven’t exactly stuck to the plan.Dramatic licence has been taken with Jason’s entire reason for finding the Fleece. The traditional story sees him go after it as part of his duty, as well as to extend the realms of his fame and power. Here though, he seeks it out in order to resurrect his wife Alceme, who was struck down on the day of her wedding to Jason by the Blacktongues.
This setup works and gives some genuine believability to Jason’s actions – as does the interaction system. When you begin a conversation with an NPC, you can generally choose from a few branches of chat to follow – much like Mass Effect – with the general goal being to glean more information that will help you on your quest, or to set up more sub-quests for yourself. Again, this works, and threatens to lead to a deep and meaningful experience or two.
Jason generally has access to his ridiculously large shield, a mace, a sword and a spear. Switching between the attacking items is as simple as tapping the L1 or R1 buttons and your other moves consist of a shield barge, light attack and heavy attack. This – despite the simplicity – also works, and you never feel as if you’re being overwhelmed and bogged down with masses and masses of RPG-style controls.
Unfortunately, Rise of the Argonauts is absolutely plagued with technical problems and inconsistencies. Within the first ten minutes of actual gameplay (once you’ve made the dinner whilst a 3.6GB install goes on and then strangely had to wait another five minutes for the game to get past its first loading screen), you’ll have become frustrated at having to stand in exactly the right spot before the option to jump over a balcony even appears, laughed until you cried as the jerkiest character animation in recent history is made even jerkier by persistently annoying framerate drops and already become bored by the bizarre slow-motion “kill camera” that comes into play every single time you make a kill. Not only that, but the ridiculous draw-in that occurs whenever you turn at more than half-speed is enough to send you to the loony bin as you swear blind that you saw a flash at the edge of the screen as the game drew the scenery in, only to be called a liar as the fully-drawn visuals are there just a few milliseconds later.
But, you persist. The game implores you to persist. The language begs you to go on because something much, much better is just around the corner. It just doesn’t happen, though. The combat is very simple to pick up – as mentioned – but when you get to the point of fighting a boss character that is making unfair demands of you and your people, you quickly realise that there isn’t much in the way of a challenge to be found. The enemy AI seems to consist of a simple block, block, attack combination, and when those blocks can be counteracted with your heavy attack, they might as well just be standing there and waiting for you to finish them off. When you consider that you can pore over which allies you want to add to your party for a fair amount of time -expecting that it’ll make a difference to the outcome – only to find that there are absolutely no team-based moves to take advantage of and that you’ll be doing pretty much all of the killing yourself anyway, and you’ll find that Rise of the Argonauts is a game that promises a great, great deal, but fails to deliver in almost every respect.
The game should have been a fine RPG that had some superb mythological and historical material to work with but the way in which that material has been used is not only confused, but is also downright confusing at times. Rise of the Argonauts isn’t a total failure, but it certainly isn’t a title that I can recommend.
