This
whole Ankh thing might just be getting out of hand.
The official website,
in addition to the two languages (English and the new Lingua Franca
of the adventure game universe, German), is now hawking five games.
What’s next, a theme park? Employees dressed as Assil and Thara wandering
around asking visitors if they want to buy smoked camel on a stick?
No, wait, smoking camel sticks would garner a gamier ESRB rating for
wanton tobacco use. (And rightfully so. You kids stay away from those
sarcophagus nails.) There’s now the three mainstream PC Ankhs alongside
an Ankh DS, for your Nintendo, and Ankh: The Hidden Treasures,
a hidden-object game. (The graphic adventure game community has spent
the past twenty years whining about pixel-hunting and now — there’s
an entire game genre devoted to that very excruciating activity!)

But you don’t want to know
about any of this. You just want to know if Ankh: Kampf Der Gotter,
or, uh, Ankh: Battle of the Gods, is worth plunking
down your fifteen to thirty smackers for the download on Steam, or
RuneSoft (yes, there’s a Mac Intel version! Ach der Lieber!) or any
of the other digital game marketplaces you can purchase this baby.
There are so many it’s hard to keep track, but, as of this writing,
some sites appear to be selling the game as though it were one of
those big “Flash-y” shareware casual releases. You know,
download the entire game and then get an hour of play before the steel
gate rattles down and the word “BUY?” appears in 192-point
bold type on your monitor.

Well,
I can tell you that Ankh: Battle of the Gods is not
a casual game. It is a full-length, expertly produced, mainstream
adventure game. The type that only a few years ago you would have
purchased in a cardboard box. It is also just as much fun as Heart
of Osiris. Ankh 3 has the same luscious
cartoony graphics as its predecessor. It has the same quirky but not
unfamiliar inventory and dialogue puzzles and character quests. I
would say it’s somewhat easier, overall, than Ankh 2,
but the production values appear (to me) to have been bumped up and
best of all, Assil, your third-person game hero, is a much more appealing,
and mature, fellow. I think the developers (somebody named Deck 13)
probably heard the criticisms of the second installment and eased
up on the puzzle difficulty and streamlined the story and the characterizations.

Oh, right, the story. I
haven’t played the first Ankh,
but I believe its story dovetails right into the start of Ankh
2. And I know that Ankh 3 starts where the
previous entry left off. Which is that Assil and his feisty gal pal
Thara finally get married. Well, at least they start off living in
a new house together, in bed asleep. If they weren’t married, the
ESRB rating would burn through that cardboard box. Though the only
jewelry in evidence is the titular Ankh still strung around Assil’s
neck. Heretofore, the Ankh, though supposedly mystical in nature,
was simply a hunk of metal. Now, the Ankh speaks! It has the soul
of some unknown god with the same patter and accent as a Borscht Belt
comedian circa the Eisenhower administration. In fact, the Ankh does
nothing but speak, at great length on occasion. The saving of the
Egyptian (and surrounding) world is still, incredibly, up to our friend
Assil. Not that Assil has gotten any happier about this duty. Nor
has Thara become any less of a nag.

You
see, as the game begins, so does the Battle of the Gods. And the only
human who can stop the nonsense is Assil. Because he’s the Ankh bearer.
Assil has to bear the Ankh out of his burning house, down to a Las
Vegasy Luxor, and on to the mystical plane of the Egyptian deities.
What is the name of the Egyptian heaven anyway? The Greeks had Olympus.
The Norse had Valhalla. Oh well, never mind. Because when you finally
get there, about halfway through the game, all the other heavens are
suburbs of the Egyptian one. In fact, one whole section of the game
takes place in Ancient Viking land. How about that for a twist?

One of my complaints about
Ankh 2 was that the writers were trying to have it
both ways. For Assil to be a genuine hero as well as a cutup. Here,
they get the balance of story and horseplay just about right. Assil
is still a bit whiny, but understandably so. He remains in his beatnik-y
sad-sack character throughout. The story now is wild and amusing,
instead of wild and corny. The one aspect of the game that plays worse
than previously is Thara. In Ankh 2 she was almost
a third of the game play, on her own and teamed up with her boyfriend.
Here, she really only appears in the first scene in the house in Cairo,
and she’s largely a spectator. You can still switch over and play
“her” for some of the first scene, but there’s little need
to. After that, she vanishes for most of the game save for a cameo
appearance at the big climactic end. That’s a shame. Because she can
be funny, despite her nagging, and the switching back and forth between
Assil and Thara to complete tasks and puzzles in Ankh 2
was the best part of that game.

Okay,
let’s see how quickly I can get through this technical stuff. Once
again, the game is cartoon third-person in 3D. The voice characterizations,
the music and the sound effects are all of professional caliber. The
standard mouse controls are still reversed: left click to look, right
click to use. Help comes via a keystroke (“x”) that momentarily
identifies the hotspots on any screen as well as via a handy list
of Assil’s current objectives when you press the tab key. Hit the
space bar to bypass cut scenes (though they are well done). The game
ran smoothly without serious glitches on my bargain-basement computer,
which means it’ll probably work on yours. Though there’s still
some trouble with subtitles overlapping. The Mac version, as I said,
apparently requires an Intel processor. Yes, you can click through
dialogues (though many are amusing). I never ran out of save slots.
You can double-click to make Assil run, not walk, or to exit most
screens. There’s is nothing particularly objectionable content-wise,
unless you’re likely to be scandalized by the sight of scantily clad
cartoon Egyptians.

Like its predecessor, Ankh
3 is a fun, expertly made, 15-20 hour adventure game of the
talk to everyone, pick up everything, and be prepared for wacky puzzle
solutions variety. In the previous game it was obvious the designers
were trying to make a LucasArts comic-strip romp. They came close
last time; they’ve come closer this time. Special mention must go
to the one “Hotel of the Gods” chapter that takes place
in an Escher-like giant room that can be rotated this way and that
to solve. Puzzle-wise, it’s the standout of the game.

Even
though I think Ankh 3 has even better graphics and
a more coherent story and game play than Ankh 2,
I’m still going to give it a B plus. Largely because I thought the
puzzles, in toto, were better in the previous game. However, this
series, if it keeps getting better, is threatening to become an episodic
classic in the old King’s Quest and Space Quest vein.

(Bonus educational material:
Evidently, the Egyptian heaven is something called the Tuat. As in,
“Tuat do I owe this honor?”)

System Requirements:

PC

• Windows XP or Vista
• Processor – at least
  2 GHz
• Memory: 512 MB RAM
• Graphics: Graphic card
  from Radeon 9800 / GeForce 5800 with 128 MB memory or better
• DirectX®: DirectX
  9.0c
• Hard Drive: 700 MB
• Sound: DirectX compatible
  sound card

MAC

• Mac OS X version 10.5.7
• 1.6GHz Intel processor
• Memory: 512 MB RAM
• Graphics: Graphic card
  from Radeon 9800 / GeForce 5800 with 128 MB memory or better
• 1.1GB hard disk space
• 128MB video RAM (Nvidia
  GeForce 7300 or ATI Radeon 2400HD or better)