Archon
Reviewed by I-Am-Lander
Today Activision makes new games and is a pretty successful
company, but where did they start off from? It was early back
to the Nintendo days, and Archon proved to be a pretty
addicting strategy game.
Graphics 7 out of 10
Even for its time in the early 90's the graphics weren't really living
up to it's full potential for the NES. At first glance you would see a
bunch of chess like characters on a black and white checkerboard.
Even in battle the characters still don't look like much as they are
just tiny little chess figures roaming around on a battle field. Not
much to look at in this game in terms of graphics though.
Music and Sound 6 out of 10
There really wasn't much of anything in this game in terms of
music and sound. There were probably 3 different sounds of
music in this game, one during the intro screen, the second one
during the checkerfield, and the last one was during battle. The
were very little sounds in this game like when you hit the opponent
with your weapon but that's about it. There wasn't really anything
special here besides the fact that it was a little catchy.
Game Play-Fun 9 out of 10
The game play was the best feature in this game. Like I said before
it was not checkers nor chess nor a combination of both, despite
the fact that there was a checkerboard field. Here you were given
16 characters from each side. The sides being Light and Dark, you
would choose which side you wanted to be from the beginning, but
there really wasn't any storyline involved in this game. Here the
Light and Dark side collide, you have your equal on every side and
you 3 ways of winning the game. First off is quite obvious, you kill
off every other member on the opposing side, the second is that
your side takes up all of the magic squares. 3 magic squares are
left unattended at the beginning while the Wizard and Sorceress
occupies the ether two magic squares. The third one is quite
difficult to achieve, you have to surround your opponent so that
they can make no more moves. To battle your opponent you pick
any of the characters you want and move them over to another
opposing character. Each character has special attributes and
weaknesses, for example a Goblin form the Dark side can be
seen as a pawn and that goes the same for the knight. A unicorn
however was very quick and agile and can attack very fast, its
equal was the basilisk. Your leader was either the Wizard or
Sorceress depending on which side you control, it doesn't matter
if they die, but they are the ones that can bring back any other
character back if they had been defeated earlier. They are the
magic casters in the game, but they are all limited to one use only.
The game still continues even if they die, then you would have these
White Squares and Black squares, if a Dark opponent would fight a
light opponent on a dark square then the Dark opponent would be
at a severe disadvantage, or vice versa. This was the best part
of the game and thus Activision did do a pretty good job on it.
Replayability 7 out of 10
This was pretty addicting and thus it would make you come back
and play the whole game over again. This wasn't like checkers nor
chess, nor a combination of both. There was a lot of strategy
involved in this game and sometimes you just want to beat the CPU
again but, try to beat them with losing the least amount of characters.
Overall it was a good effort here.
Overall 7 out of 10
This game doesn't disappoint much and its strategy at its best.
However its not like most strategy games, its more of a quick
battle between 32 characters and the game is very easy to pick
up. Pick this game up if you like a strategy game that's quick and
not boring or if you just want to see how Activision did back then.