Okay, a limited amount of space and so much to say. So rather than waste time with a lot of made-up preamble about my days in the German U-Boat squadrons (Surely 'humorous introductory text'? - Ed.). I'll get straight on with why Archimedean Dynasty should be taking up room on your games shelf (well, it's not as though you haven't already peeked at the outragously high score so it would be pointless my trying to build up any kind of suspense, wouldn't it?).
How to describe it? Well, take your Wing Commander series, throw away the 'space-shooty' bits (Space-shooty? - Ed.), throw away the Mark Hamill/fmv bits so that all you've got left is the concept, replace them with the underwater simulation bits from Subwar 2050 and a gamut of pre-rendered animations, improve the entire gameplay by several hundred per cent, tart it all up and bingo, one Archimedean Dynasty.
That actually makes it sound a lot worse than it is. What I'm trying to say is that it's an underwater Wing Commander IV without any time-consuming and costly film sequences. It's set in a totally submerged Earth of the future, where you play the part of a mercenary fighter pilot, embroiled in the war between corporations. I won't say much more because it'll ruin the fun and I haven't the room.
One of the problems I had with the Wing Commander games (at least the early ones) was that despite the background storylines, for the most part each mission was the same. Archimedean Dynasty solves this by having missions that match up to the storylines that lead you to them - mainly underwater dogfighting with bad guys - but the way these missions are structured is what lends them so much credibility. You never know what to expect and it's this unpredictability that makes it so much fun.
It also helps that the action bits are a true 3D simulation. The ships are all real textured polygons, there are underwater currents to deal with, canyons, ridges, cliff faces, buildings, outposts, huge warships, small fighter subs - everything is real, behaves real, looks real and plays real.
And they're tied together with some of the best presentation I've seen for a long time. The pre-rendered animations that tell the general story only occur every once in a while, giving a real feeling of reward once you get to them and the in-game graphics have to be seen to be believed.
Gone fishin'
I would have liked to see a little more character interaction when you're not fighting and it might have been fun to add a basic trading element to let the player have a real feeling of freedom, but on the whole there's little to say against Archimedean Dynasty. It seems underwater sci-fi is making a comeback. With TV's 'SeaQuest 2030' proving to be miles better than its predecessor, Archimedean Dynasty proving to be miles better than Origin's space-saga and Kevin Costner's 'Waterworld' proving, er, well okay, bad example.
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