Atlantis 2: Beyond Atlantis

Get the GOG version. This is a trash mobile port with half of the game missing

I expect an adventure game of this vintage to be weird and confusing, which is why I was willing to bang my head against it for a couple hours before going online and seeing what others had to say. While there's some truth to my initial assumption, it appears the Steam version of [i]Atlantis II[/i] is uniquely bungled and not worth another second of my time or yours. Which is a pity. Sorta. This game is the kind of quirky relic that speaks to me. It's also heavy on cumbersome mazes and depictions of real-world cultures that... Well, look, I haven't done thorough research, and I don't have the personal background to tell you how accurate or respectful any of this is, but based on what information I [i]can[/i] find about the developers, I'm not alone in that. Maybe we just let this one stay in the past.

Let me start by clarifying that the sole reason I recommend this game is its very low price. Besides that, it is a bad game with numerous flaws and weak points and only a handful or redeeming qualities. I will also mention that, as you can see in many other reviews, this game is only a botched port of the original. I did check online playthroughs and, indeed, a significant chunk of content (puzzles, cutscenes, etc) is missing. I will focus only on the present version of the game. My main complaint is the convoluted story and its very little connection to the first Atlantis game, which I consider excellent. It feels like a number of ideas for separate games loosely bound together and topped with a forced, pseudo-deep ending. To make things worse, a lot of characters are downright goofy, in a very negative way. Besides all that, I found the Aztec stage very tedious and tiresome. Regarding positive points, the soundtrack can be decent (if repetitive), the scenery is nice and running around gathering items can be somewhat entertaining. A joke I genuinely appreciated was *spoiler* Hell being a bureaucratic service with bored employees. As a matter of fact, that joke is the only good …

BEWARE: Game cannot be finished and there is at least on softlock which requires reload of whole chapter! Near the very end, there is a bug that causes you to not have the crystal/stone you need to insert into the center of the dial on the ship in your inventory, preventing you from advancing to the final chapter in space. There is a bug at the very end that causes you to no longer have the crystal that you need to insert intomiddle of dial on the ship and you cannot finnish it. In the inventory, you have another crystal from the previous chapter, which is useless in this part of the game. Softlock in Yucatan/Maya part is If you insert the obsidian foot tile into the statue of the Jaguar god in Xibalba, but you have put it in wall in the Jaguar temple, by the lizard statue in the city, then you're screwed because it cannot be removed. A soft lock in the Yucatan/Maya section can occur if you insert an obsidian tile into the statue in Xibalba and then insert a second tile into the wall of the Jaguar Temple, next to the lizard statue in the city- you're screwed, because there is no way to take it out again. Another nice bug occurred when I looked at the fan in the Chinese underwor…

I attempted to play the original version so many times as a kid - left the OG CD back at my parents house - remembered this game existed and very happily found it on Steam. So bummed that basically ALL the puzzles are removed. It really is just a point and click game you can rush through but with serious lack of direction since so much of the content is missing, Serious shout out to all the folks that created walk-thrus so I could at least saw I finished the game. The ending was absolutely wild for me since I didn't play the first game.....hahah.

It was a great game, but they cut a lot of content in this version, including all the puzzles. So now it's just a primitive point-and-click game.