Ladies and Gentleman,
step this way please! Follow me into my humble nomadic
reviewers’ tent, where today you shall feast your eyes upon a most precious
object from a land far, far away. Gather around now, as I unveil this rarest
of rare specimens: a genuine comic adventure! Yessirs and madams, Ankh is
the name, and it comes to you from the fine folks at Deck 13 Interactive, all
the
way from Germany. As you might have already guessed from the name by now, the
game is indeed set in Egypt – the land of mighty Pharoahs, colossal Pyramids
and much sand. What’s that you say? “Buggerit! … not ANOTHER
game set in Egypt!”? Ah, well. Sure you’ve played your fair share
of Riddle of the
Sphinx, Tomb of the Pharoah, Egypt
II: The Heliopolis Prophecy and The Egyptian Prophecy:
Fate
of Ramses. But I ask you, did any of these games
require you to operate a drive through Camel-O-Wash, fight toothless crocodiles
in the Nile and make stinky fish burgers for assassins? Settle down now, and
take a long, cool sip of your sweet sherbets, as I recount to you my impressions
of this spanking new adventure.

In its essence, Ankh is
an old-school, point-and-click, comic 3D adventure in the vein
of such LucasArts classics as Monkey Island,
Day of the Tentacle and Grim
Fandango. Ankh is actually a remake
of a game of the same name, which was released almost eight years
ago. Of course it’s highly unlikely you’ll have come
across the original – the game was released exclusively for
the Acorn RiscPC platform which never really took off. Only about
500,000 RiscPC machines were ever sold, a majority of them in Great
Britain where they were bought by British schools, while the rest
were purchased by private users scattered in Germany, France, Ireland,
Australia and New Zealand (practically none were sold in the United
States). Thankfully, the developers of Ankh, some of whom also worked
on the original, are assured of a much larger audience this time
around, with the release of the game for the PC platform. And it’s
not the same old game either – everything from the storyline
to the graphics has undergone an extreme makeover.

Ankh tells the story of
a young Egyptian architect’s son named
Assil, who breaks into a pyramid to party with his friends, only
to accidentally knock over some ancient urns and have a death curse
put upon him by a none-too-pleased mummy. It doesn’t help that
Assil also ends up defiling a sacred artifact (an Ankh) in the tomb,
using it as a bottle opener. The Pharoah is the only person who can
help Assil find a way to lift this curse, and the game follows your
quest to meet the Pharoah, and get out of your cursed predicament.
Of course, as per the dictates of adventure gaming tradition, this
will be anything but straightforward, and you will soon find yourself
bumbling through several totally unrelated side-quests and bumping
into all sorts of odd characters, including cut-throat merchants,
jive-talking ferrymen, retired genies, hungry assassins and well … what
seemed like Israelite hippies waiting on the Exodus.

The interface in this
game is a simple mouse-driven affair, with the cursor changing
to an appropriate action (pick-up, look-at, talk-to
etc.) when over an object on the screen which can be interacted with.
A left-click gives more information about the object being pointed
to, and also moves Assil with a single (walk), or a double (run)
click. Right-clicking to use an item will however need a little getting
used to, but you should have no problems after the first few minutes
of playing. Pressing TAB during the game pops up a reminder list
which shows the status of the most recent and pressing sub-quests
that you’ve been burdened with, and need to be solved. Veterans
and even newcomers to adventure games will have no problems cozying
up to this intuitive interface.

As far as the puzzles
are concerned, the game serves ample portions of the standard inventory-based
ones which we’ve come to expect
from point-and-click adventure games in the past. For the most part,
you’ll find yourself collecting various items, as you interact
with characters and locations in the game, and combining them in
sometimes obvious, although often head-scratching ways. Yes, there
are a few outrageously tough ones too which defy common sense, and
where the only recourse will be to randomly combine items in your
inventory until something clicks. I somehow got the feeling the developers
of this game did not spend sufficient time designing and thinking
about how these puzzles will fit into the plot. When you do solve
a puzzle, it will most likely be out of sheer luck, and not as a
result of any kind of neuron exercising brainwork.

While the inventory-based
puzzles might not be one of the game’s
strengths, the graphics certainly muster up enough eye candy to make
up for it. Ankh has gorgeous cartoony 3D environments and surprisingly
expressive character models, which are sure to please even the most
discerning of eye. The locales in the game are vibrant and colorful,
and the cinematics are top notch. However, the heavy reliance on
3D in the game also means an abundance of sometimes lengthy load
screens. These might not be much of an issue initially, but when
you’re walking from one end of the map to the other, and encounter
several of these in a row, it can become quite bothersome.

The background music in the game is pleasant and does the job. The
best compliment I can pay to it is that it is not annoying, even
after listening to the same track for the umpteenth time. The character
voiceovers sound professional, and capture the personality and emotions
of the characters quite well. The voice editing and sound effects
however, could have been much better. Sound effects are sparse at
best, and oftentimes, when a character speaks, it feels as if voice
samples have been clumsily spliced together, because the pacing of
the words is so inconsistent. Many times, when more than one character
on the screen speaks, the voices overlap into unintelligible sound
bits.

For the most part, the
storyline in Ankh is engaging and moves along at a fairly good
pace. Towards the latter half of the game, you’ll
even get to play as another character, Thara, the beautiful and spirited
Arabian ambassadors daughter, who serves as the obligatory romantic
twist in the tale. Switching between controlling Assil and Thara
to accomplish quests was a lot of fun, although I did encounter a
minor annoyance here: one of the characters would inevitably end
up blocking the way for the other character when they were in a confined
space, like a corridor, requiring switching control back and forth
to remove the other character from the path, before proceeding. The
cracks on the surface begin to widen towards the end of the game.
Characters start unintentionally running on walls and walking through
solid objects, and voiceovers start to go missing. The endgame sequence
is plagued with bugs and required a lot of patience and random trial-and-error
before I could get it right. I also felt that the game wrapped up
a little too quickly for my liking. Experienced players will likely
finish this game within 8-10 hours. Nonetheless, I believe I’m
nitpicking here and it’s not nearly as bad as it seems – I
thoroughly enjoyed playing Ankh and loved the plot, and it certainly
has its moments when you’ll find yourself grinning like a Cheshire
cat.

Conclusion

Ankh is a charming old-school
comic adventure which holds its own, courtesy of its beautiful
3D graphics and an engaging plot. It does
not break any new ground, and it certainly has its fair share of
issues which take a bit if luster off its polished appearance. But
if you like adventure games, and particularly the comic-adventures
from LucasArts in the past, you will overlook the shortcomings, and
enjoy a fun, albeit short romp down memory lane. When all’s
said and done, one can’t ignore the dearth of quality comic
adventures out there of late. Until the next Monkey Island or Grim
Fandango comes along, Ankh will do for now.

Final Grade: B+
(find out more about our
grading system)

System Requirements:

Minimum:
– CPU with 1.5 GHz
– 256MB RAM
– GeForce3 with 64MB VRAM or better
– 800MB of free hard disc space

Recommended:
– CPU with 2.4 GHz or better
– 512MB RAM
– DirectX9 graphics card (ATI Radeon 9700, GeForce 5800) with 128MB VRAM
– 800MB of free hard disc space