Atlantis The Lost Empire 2001 By: THQ

Overview:

"Atlantis: The Lost Empire" is a beautiful, fast paced side scrolling adventure game based on the Disney movie of the same name. Disney's experience releasing side scrolling adventure games, based on their movies, has finally paid off, "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" is a beautiful, frenetic game that appeals to a broad range of gamers, regardless of their familiarity with the movie. "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" has attractive cut scenes, exceptionally colorful and well defined levels, catchy music and solid sound effects, objectives that give this scroller more depth than just running from location A to location B, tight controls, and an insanely fast pace that makes "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" is a real pleasure to play. I'm not sure how good the movie is, but the game is one of the best scrollers I've played on the Console Classix site.

Player's take control of Milo Thatch, a character whose grandfather spent his life looking for the lost city of Atlantis, finally discovering the location of the lost city before his death. Milo and his friends attempt to finish the work that Milo's grandfather began, unlocking the secrets of Atlantis along the way. The player seeks to fulfill a variety of objectives, while exploring the various levels. Some of the objectives include rescuing trapped crew members, and helping other character make repairs on the underwater sea vessels. A time limit adds urgency and challenge to clearing levels. The levels are very distinct in terms of appearance and feel, as are the enemies.

The really fun thing about "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" is the speed with which the characters move, making clearing a level frantic, but fun. The character animations are stellar, and very impressive considering the pace that "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" is played at.

I was very impressed at the way "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" rolls out the story of the game. The story unfolds a little bit more after the completion of each stage, at the beginning of Milo's journey he hopes to finish what his grandfather started and simply locate the city of Atlantis, once there, Milo meets a princess and begins to unravel the mystery of the crystals (a collectable object in the game) and how they relates to Atlantis. The story of "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" actually has some meat, a rarity for a side scrolling platform game. Making the story roll out even more enjoyable are the amazing cut scenes played between levels. I struggle to find any faults in "Atlantis: The Lost Empire", except for the password progress system, "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" is a flawless, high-octane, platform scrolling adventure that gamers of all ages should familiarize themselves with as soon as possible.

Directions:

In "Atlantis: The Lost Empire", players must navigate their character through stages by completing objective before finding the stage's exit. The player must jump, climb, duck, and crawl to navigate the stage hazards. Most stages have a variety of objects that must be interacted with (just as valves, ropes, and chains) to unlock areas, and complete objectives. There are ten stages in all, I did not encounter any bosses in my play through.

The player's character has a health bar located in the upper left hand corner of the screen, when the health bar is depleted the player will expire. Each game is started with three lives, and three continues. The player will pick a weapons (such as a boomerang and dynamite) in the course of completing stages. Weapons can be used on enemies, or item crates (which typically reveal blue crystals).

The player will also discover and collect blue crystals as they explore stages. Crystal collection is optional, I'm not quite sure what the crystals are used for because I never was able to collect a high enough amount of them, however the game promises hidden features if the player is able to collect the mandated quantity.

"Atlantis: The Lost Empire" uses a password save system, and doesn't not have an option to augment the difficulty.