And, unfortunately,
Atlantis falls prey to the same plague that's been hitting all of Disney's recent PSOne games--it's an imitation of the gameplay pioneered in games like
Spyro and
Croc, and it never reaches the level of excitement or immersivity of those titles. While
Atlantis adds a number of adventure game elements to the game, the frustrating controls and lack of real excitement in the game make it one that's best left to the fans, or people who simply adore the genre.
See, I'm one of those. Even mediocre platform adventure titles tickle my spine, and as I played Atlantis and found myself enjoying the experience, I realized that it wasn't because it was a good game--it was because I'm strange. Er. What I'm trying to tell you is that Atlantis has many of the accoutrements of the genre--you've got the easy-to-find dealies to collect, the slightly-harder-to-find dealies to collect, and the pain-in-the-butt dealies to collect, each of which does something nice for you. You've got puzzles and jumps and doors and so on, and while they all require a few 'challenging' moments, it's nothing that a ten-year-old couldn't figure out.
As you play Atlantis, you'll switch between controlling a number of characters, such as Audrey with her 'flare' gun and Moliere with his headset. Each character has a particular ability or two that they're good at: Milo can climb and decipher Atlantean writings, Audrey can fix things, Vinny can blow stuff up, and so on. This part is very reminiscent of Fur Fighters, where you have to figure out the proper character to use to progress. You can switch characters at any radio, although which characters you can choose depends on the situation. They all share the same life meter, which is sort of lame, but eh.
Other than the typical collecting fare, you have to do a number of simple 'puzzles' to progress in the game. This could mean flipping a switch, finding items and putting them in the right locations, or occasionally combining two items into one more useful object. These sort of mild inventory manipulation puzzles never really feel out of place, but they help push Atlantis into even more slow-moving territory.
And trust me, Atlantis is slow. The worlds you'll adventure in are generally vast, but there are large stretches of walkway and cavernous passages that have nothing but the ambient sounds and the crunching of your footsteps. Indeed, you won't even meet your first real enemies until you're almost all the way through the second level. While some may prefer this sort of easy-going adventure style, it makes the world seem a little emptier than it should.
The game also relies too much on jumping puzzles, which with a wonky camera makes it more frustrating than it should. It's a relatively short game, but not too terribly short; a weekend rental may or may not find the kids beating the game, depending on how heavily they play it and how good their timing is with jumping.
