By Dale Farris, President, Golden Triangle PC Club
December 2001

Game Overview

Beyond Atlantis II is another new adventure game from Dreamcatcher, the computer game company well known for numerous adventure and action games. In this new game, you play the role of a young archeologist as she searches for the existence of a metropolis built, according to myth and legend, by the ancient Egyptians. From the palaces of the Thousand and One Nights to the Sahara Desert, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the icy plains of the Paleolithic, in this super adventure game you immerse yourself in the beauty and the mystery of the mysterious worlds in the game. 

As you move throughout the game, you discover the extraordinary power that can forever change the destiny of humanity, and find out who to trust. Many challenges are faced before the end truth is finally revealed. Of the many adventure games from Dreamcatcher, Beyond Atlantis II is one of their more mysterious, intriguing and dangerous of adventures.

The game comes on 3 CD ROM discs. The first is used to install the game, and you play the game on discs 2 and 3.

The attention to detail in the design of the game is super, and the imagined worlds in the game are totally mysterious but believable, while presenting many new scenes and settings never before seen in other adventure games. All the screen views are full-color, richly detailed, and reveal the effort of the developers to produce these beautiful backgrounds. In all scenes, after you click to move, you have full 360 degree panning, to let you look all around you, up and down, and left and right.

The puzzles in Beyond Atlantis II are not the most difficult I've ever seen, but these will challenge your ability to reason out what needs to be done in order to by-pass guards, or open up items, or to open access to other items. In this adventure game, the focus seemed more on presenting a unique, mysterious game play experience, than deviously designing intricate and seriously difficult puzzles to solve. The use of the time portal means you will move in and out of time, something that adds to the mysterious nature of the game.

You start out in Egypt, and with your character's mysterious innate abilities you step through a time portal back into time to the days of Egyptian pharaohs. The puzzles show up from the beginning, and are challenging enough to intrigue, while not being so overly frustrating. You then travel to various temples, solving puzzles in order to find objects that have to be brought back to other temples. Completing these results in a return to present time.

Then you move through a very fascinating membrane setting in the game, finding and talking with a dolphin that speaks in riddles that turn out to be clues how to get to the other areas of the game. You again move through a time portal into the Paleolithic era, and solve puzzles here as well. There is one timed-release puzzle here, in which you have to throw a rock at a circling tiger, in order to advance. While the coders obviously tried to present the action cursor at the right locations, nevertheless this requires trial-and-error in order to figure out at exactly what place and time to throw the rock, in order to get past this tiger.

You enter the membrane area again, and return to the Paleolithic land, solve more puzzles and then move into the land of the Arabian Nights. There is a Snakes and Ladders type of game here you have to beat, mostly on luck, and you then enter an arena that requires you to solve a constellation puzzle involving lighting up various star constellations.

Solving these brings you to yet another puzzle, a drawer selection challenge, that once solved brings you back again to the membrane area with the dolphin. You leave the portal room again, speaking again with the dolphin that gives you directions for where to go next. Arriving in a garden, you find two characters that are a puzzle as you must figure out in what order to speak with these characters.

This leads you to the scepter object that the main bad guys in the game want you to give them. Instead, you return for the final time to the membrane area, speak again with the dolphin, and you enter the main archaeological camp at the end of the game. Overcoming the camp guard, you speak to the Targui character you met earlier in the game, and then drive off to end the game.

Throughout this game, the dialog options and the unfolding game story slowly fill in the essential plot points of the game. I thought this very unusual story was difficult to follow, and some players may find this unnecessarily frustrating.

Summary of Features

An exciting adventure combining visual and audio brilliance
Mysterious tale set in a fantastic realm of uniquely designed worlds
Extraordinary worlds to explore
Gripping, graphical adventure that captures the imagination
Full-screen immersion in beautiful graphics
Totally recreated settings in detail
Beautifully drawn backgrounds, objects, and characters
Interesting but sometimes confusing plot
Inventory interface for objects to use
Fluid animation
Engaging puzzles
Intriguing characters
Sequel to the Beyond Atlantis adventure game

Game Play

Beyond Atlantis II is a classic point-and-click adventure game. You click where you want to go, and the game then loads the video files that animate this movement. You can look all around each spot, up and down, and left and right, and this will be important in order to find all the required objects that have to be used in other locations of the game.

The inventory is much simpler than many adventure games, and the mouse pointer shapes change according to whether you wish to move or place an object on another object or person. Of course, finding these objects and then figuring out which other person to give the objects is part of the puzzling nature of the game. 

The official walkthrough guide of course helps you more quickly decipher what is to go where, and how to complete some of the more intricate puzzles. The puzzles in the game are also well designed, and quite an eyeful, although some are more difficult than others.

Beyond Atlantis II is a good adventure game that all adventure gamers will certainly not want to miss.

About The Walkthrough Solution Guides

I urge anyone interested in this neat game to also consider getting a copy of the solutions guide. In my case, I always work with adventure games with the official walkthrough, because I just do not have all the extra time to try and puzzle out the correct combinations of either objects or puzzle solutions. I just have too many other things to do.

However, many adventure gamers choose to play without a solutions guide, as they prefer to reason out the game on their own. In these situations I also think they probably have far more available hours to devote to playing the game than I do. In my situation, playing with a walkthrough means I can concentrate on moving the game plot along, and most importantly, open up all the wonderful scenes and action that the coders have worked so hard to include in the game. Without a walkthrough, I just feel I am not getting my money's worth out of the game. Also, I always appreciate having the help to get through the game so I can savor all the impressive screens and animated cut-scenes, as was the intent of the game creators.

There is a certain degree of frustration with being stuck in an adventure game that varies from one gamer to another, and in my case, with all the other things I have to do, I just do not have the luxury of working endlessly for hours and hours on end to try and figure out what's not working in order to advance to another key plot point. So, my perspective about walkthrough guides is that these help make adventure games more fun. Not being able to decipher a puzzle or having the right object at the right time is not my idea of fun with an adventure game. 

What makes this issue even more relevant here is that DreamCatcher seems to realize this, as evidenced by their always wise price points for their games and their solution guides. Schizm is so reasonably priced that this makes buying the additional solutions guide (also very smartly priced) a no-brainer. You end up with a total investment that means you will be better assured you can get through the entire game and not end up spending an excessive amount of time with the game. So, no, I don't think using a walkthrough solution guide is any indication of any lack of skill or abilities, but instead, a more appropriate way to invest minimal time with an adventure game, that ends up much more likely to be a fun experience.

Targeted Customers

Beyond Atlantis II will appeal to all adventure gamers.

Install and Setup

The game should install and set up with no problems, but I experienced problems trying to open a saved game after I had saved a game and closed the program. You can save the game at any place in the game, a nice feature, and when you first start the game, you can select from various available player selections. This means other folks in the house can play the game on the same machine, and each can save their progress.

So, when I tried to later come back and open a saved game, the game crashed to the desktop ever time. I could not open a saved game, in order to try and change some of the video or audio options, thinking this was likely the cause of this problem. All I could do was start all over again, as a new player, and try to save a game under this new player setup.

After starting over again, and having to save this next game, I tried to again open this second game under this new second player, and it again crashed to the desktop.

So, I guess in my case I needed to allocate enough spare time to start a brand new game, and play it completely through to the end, in order to see the game to the end, because on my particular system, I could not open any saved games, although I could start all over again. I suspect this had to do with the video card and sound card, and the drivers for each, along with the system settings, but since I could not open a saved game to then try and change these settings, I can only assume this was the source of this problem. I also think most all other players will not experience these problems. These were very likely not due to any coding issue in the game, but just the incompatibility with the particular complexity of my particular machine, which of course will not be the same with other machines.

I loaded the game on a Win 98 SE machine (P III-850, 256MB SDRAM) that had a Creative Labs Annihilator 2, 32MB video card (an nVidia GeForce 2 GTS board), and a Creative Labs Live X Gamer! sound board, and the latest drivers for each. An HP CD RW 9200 drive served as the CD ROM drive, and I had a 12X DVD ROM drive for the DVD ROM version. The mouse and keyboard were both USB connections. I also had already installed the DirectX 8.1 files, and did not need to install the DirectX files that came with the game. My machine also had an internal Zip 250 drive, standard floppy, MPEG 2 decoder card, two 8-port USB hubs, a Logitech Wingman Extreme joystick, standard microphone, Cambridge Soundworks DTS 2000 speaker system, and a NIC board connected to SW Bell's DSL modem.

Price

$24.99 both CD ROM and DVD ROM version
$  9.99 the official strategy & solutions guide (a great bargain also)

Minimum System Configuration Requirements

Windows 95, 98, ME, XP
Pentium II 300 MHz
64 MB RAM
DirectX compatible video and sound card
12x CD-ROM Drive

At the time of this writing, no patches for the game had been released.

At the time of this writing, DreamCatcher also sells games for Mac machines, with more soon to be available also for the Mac. No other information was available on the future continued support of their software for Apple machines. I am guessing this support is very likely to continue.

The above system configuration requirements indicate the minimum system configuration requirements, and as any experienced gamer knows, you just don't ever want to load and run any computer game on minimally configured systems. Computer games are notorious for taking over machines, and this is why users will need to be sure and close out all their other open files, before playing this and any computer game.

About DreamCatcher

In 1996, DreamCatcher Interactive launched their first title and since then, they have become a very successful publisher in the computer game entertainment software industry. In my opinion, one of this company's strongest assets is their dedication to provide customers with high quality entertainment software at very affordable prices. Some of the best interactive computer games now on the market come from DreamCatcher.

Bringing to market titles that are affordable, without jeopardizing content quality, is another significant factor that helps distinguish this company from the many that flood the market with countless game titles. DreamCatcher thrives on innovative marketing strategies, solid retail and developer partnerships, and on providing excellent customer support that is well above industry standards.

A new partnership with Her Interactive has enabled DreamCatcher to now sell the super games in the Nancy Drew series, including Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill, Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger, and Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion. Check this link to read a review of these Nancy Drew Interactive Mystery Adventure Games.

Dracula: The Resurrection and In Cold Blood are two current games for the PC that will soon be released for the Playstation, and DreamCatcher also plans to release more games in the future for the Playstation 2 and the GameBoy Color platforms.

Necronomicon ($19.99) and The Legend of the Prophet and the Assassin ($19.99) are two of DreamCatcher's newer games that should also prove to be successful titles in their long list of super adventure games.

Other super games from DreamCatcher Interactive include Traitor's Gate, The Messenger, Riddle of the Sphinx, Jewels of the Oracle, Jewels II, Egypt 1156 B.C., Odyssey, TimeScape, Ancient Conquest, Beyond Time, Beyond Atlantis, Lightbringer, Legend of Lotus Spring, Nightlong, Seven Games of the Soul (also sold in Europe as Faust), SafeCracker, The Forgotten, The Sacred Amulet, and Time Machine.

All these are similarly designed adventure games, and all are priced very reasonably, the most expensive being $29.99 (In Cold Blood), with most around $14.99, and many even priced at $9.99, which I think are super prices for these super games. At the time of this writing, I have purchased and played nearly all these games, and these reasonable price points have always gotten my attention.

I think these affordable price points represent a very important strategy of DreamCatcher that has helped them achieve their success. When you consider the very expensive proposition to invest in the coding and other very expensive costs to develop and produce a computer game today, I think it is quite remarkable that this company markets their products at such a reasonable price.

I also think it is important to remember that DreamCatcher is still very much in the business of producing quality computer games, something many other companies can no longer attest to since they have gone out of business. What is even more remarkable, in my opinion, is that at the time of this writing, DreamCatcher Interactive remains wholly owned and self-sufficient, and has not yet been absorbed by a larger company.

So, with the easy on the pocket-book price of the game, and the also minimal price of the solution guides, you have the makings of a winner in the hotly contested battle for our limited disposable income and free time to invest in playing computer games. DreamCatcher Interactive is certainly a company worth watching and supporting.

Contact Information

DreamCatcher
The Adventure Company
5000 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario
M3H 5T5
info@dreamcatchergames.com

You can also order from other retailers or online vendors.