Archimedean Dynasty

The Good
In the 27th century, the surface of earth has become an inhabitable, radioactive wasteland. Mankind has found refuge at the bottom of the sea, living in gigantic underwater cities, breathing artificial air, long after the last human being has seen the sun. You are Emerald "Dead Eye" Flint, a mercenary submarine captain who gets caught in-between a global conflict.

Archimedean Dynasty's gameplay is that of classic space shooters such as TIE Fighter or Elite (minus the trading), with the notable twist of all the fighting taking place underwater. While this, especially regarding the outstanding 3D graphics for its time, could be seen as merely an aesthetical difference, it is instead so much more. Motion and physics are very different from your average space shooter or air combat sim. You can feel the waves and underwater currents, gently rocking your ship and later even allowing you to perform stealth missions by cutting your engines and turning off your sonar to let yourself drift close into an enemy base without being detected.

There are 60 missions, ranging from escort and reconnaissance jobs to battles in heated war-zones. Later, war ships and freighters, literally a kilometer in size have to be protected... or destroyed. As you upgrade your ship, you get better sonars, additional turrets (which can be equipped with different kinds of auto-aiming software) and better armor. There is an astonishing variety of torpedoes as well, with varying speeds and targeting methods, EMP attacks, cluster bombs or a huge, slow missile that can bring down an entire building in a single blow. Of course, their cost varies as well, so you might think twice before sending a $400 missile after an enemy scout.

Between missions the story progresses in the form of pre-rendered cut-scenes (some featuring the rather rare, but excellent voice narration) and text-based conversations in various underwater cities of Blade-Runneresque quality or aboard huge carrier ships. You never even see any character's face, but somehow this doesn't hurt the story. To the contrary, the tons of text-based dialog help to create a truly epic story while still describing the various hardboiled characters you meet in detail. Flint himself is a rare perfect blend of bad-ass and melancholic anti-hero that is a joy to play. Over the course of the game you literally travel the whole world (well, the seas), meeting a colorful cast of warlords, pirates, politicians, scientists, merchants or simple workers telling you about their day. Each adding a puzzle piece to your picture of this dark and gritty underwater world. Archimedean Dynasty, after all, is also an outstanding piece of science-fiction. You can feel the effort that has gone into research. Little things, like black market merchants offering you special champagne that sparkles in high air pressure or the so-called Entropoint stations that allow high-speed underwater travel add to the believability of an underwater civilization. Maybe I should add that this is one of the few games I play in my native German language, since it is originally developed by a German studio, thus making it the most authentic version. I can't comment on how much of the dialog's wittiness might have been lost in translation for the English version.

I played the whole game with the arrow keys on my keyboard. It works, despite the controls clearly being optimized for joysticks. Generally, Archimedean Dynasty is the kind of game where it is vital to read the manual beforehand. The "h" key was my best friend, listing about 50 keyboard commands (some of which more vital than others). It might be my inner geek speaking and I am certainly a little biased (since I love this game to bits) but in a way, I liked the fact that you can control every aspect of your ship with its own key. You feel like mastering a whole cockpit with all the little buttons and switches. The HUD is plastered with information most of which turns out to be useful in battle, especially a stylish radar on the lower part of your screen. This certainly plays more like a simulation than a straight action game.

Last but not least, the sound design and music are outstanding is well. The sound of distant ships or weapon fire is muffled by the water, machinery constantly hums in the background, a metallic "CLONK!" shatters the hulls of the ship when hitting other vehicles or buildings... all this gives you a sense of being in the deep sea.

The Bad
My only complaints are mere nitpicking.

I would have liked to see mouse-look support since I don't have a joystick, but I guess that type of control wasn't very popular back in 1996. Especially during some of the more crowded battles a bigger, full-screen map would have been helpful for navigation. The "lock-on nearest target" function seems to fail often towards the end of the game, I haven't found out whether this is a stealth ability of the enemy ships or just a bug. It is also unnecessary that "paralyzed" (by EMP strikes) ships are not considered defeated, which means you have to search the whole battlefield for disabled wreckages and destroy them to finish many of the later missions.

Lastly, an invisible "radiation barrier" that keeps you from traveling too high, can turn out to be annoying since it causes your engines to shut down (which makes it hard to move down again), eventually even destroying your ship while enemies tend to not to be affected by this.

There were a few bugs as well, with the game crashing (mostly at non-annoying places, though). I can't say, however, whether this is the game's or DosBOX' fault. Sometimes, enemy ships go right through buildings or terrain, which can look odd, but hardly affects gameplay

The Bottom Line
Archimedean Dynasty is the kind of game that sticks to your memory. I only played it on a friend's PC when it came out in 1996, for a long time, lacking the hardware to run it myself. But even that short impression was strong enough to make me pick it up again, years later. The game is just as good as I remembered, no false nostalgia. The atmosphere of the story bits is amazing while the mission design makes full use of the game's versatile engine.

I should also mention that this game spawned two sequels, AquaNox and AquaNox 2. I haven't played either (but intend to catch up), yet heard from avid fans that, while good games themselves, some of the gloomy grittiness has been lost.

I enjoyed Archimedean Dynasty more than many AAA modern titles released in the past few years. For me, it is a huge confirmation of the legendary status of the 1990ies as the "golden age of games". This innovative mixture of detailed gameplay, somber yet colorful art, original settings, deep story telling and elegant technology creates an atmosphere that borders perfection. I did not hesitate to grant this game a spot in my personal list of "best games ever", despite being far away from my usual genres of choice.