Description
Archipelagos is a real-time puzzle and strategy game with an unconventional premise and equally unconventional gameplay.
US release premise: In the future, man carelessly poisons the earth with nuclear waste. The polar ice caps have melted, turning the surface of the earth into many islands of decaying land masses, known as Archipelagos. Man then built systems to try to clean up the pollution, but these failed. The only life left were genetically-altered plants made in an effort to clean up the waste -- these also turned hostle. It is up to you to clean up the earth, island by island.
Controlling a hoversphere, it is up to you to make Earth's many islands of land habitable. To do this, you need to knock out the radiation generators on each island, which can be done by knocking out each generator's power sources (there are several per island). Once these are knocked out, you have 90 seconds to get back to the generator and disable it before it melts down, taking you with it.
Obstacles, unfortunately for you, are plentiful: You can't knock out a power source unless it is connected by a "land bridge" to the generator. You have the ability to create land where needed, but this takes up energy, and you have a limited supply. Also a hinderance are the many genetically-altered entities left behind on the islands: Viral trees that poison the ground; necromancers (former hoverspheres) that now erode land instead of creating it; eco eggs that explode on touch; and aircleaners, who are ruthlessly efficient in cleaning up the air -- and everything else, including you.
The entire game plays from a 3-D 1st-person viewpoint. A movable cursor selects where to move or what to manipulate.
There are 10,000 islands on Earth to purify. If you can make it past Archipelago #100, you are then free to select any of them.
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Trivia
The premise of the original European release of Archipelagos was quite different than the USA release: The islands were supposedly occupied by petrified "souls of the ancients", and were under control by aliens. To beat the alien obelisk, you needed to free all the souls from the stones by destroying them. The trees infecting the land were supposedly infecting the land with the "blood of the ancients". See the alternate description for more details.
The gameplay was 100% identical -- it just had a different premise. This is yet another example of American "marketing localization": Changing the game slightly to be more appealing to American audiences. Another example of marketing localization can be found in the differences between
Captain Blood Euro and USA releases.
