An all around mediocre game. At times extremely frustrating, and at times satisfying.

User Rating: 5 | The Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian GC
Rise of the Akkadian isn't necessarily a bad game. The story is pretty good, and the action gameplay is pretty good, too. And with an action/adventure game, those two traits are pretty important. But this game just doesn't feel finished, and it's got some debilitating bugs and problems.

The graphics aren't bad. They're not great either, but the character models look okay, and the environment looks all right, although it's a little "blocky". There are some collision detection problems too, but they don't effect gameplay too drastically. The sound is also all right. The Rock lends his voice to the title character. The background sounds and enemy sounds are okay, but nothing spectacular.

The gameplay overall is good. But there are some inconsistencies that really grated at my patience. Of all the enemies you fight through the game, the most difficult ones to defeat are dogs. Just standard dogs. The gameplay is set up so that when you attack, the dogs are under your attack, so you can only hit them with certain attacks, which end up leaving you vulnerable. Fortunately, once you get halfway or so through the game, you won't have to deal with them anymore.

The developers, to their credit, tried to add a little adventure style of gameplay in. There's a bit of character development, with 2 stats you can increase. The problem is, it's pretty much useless. The status bars, potentially, go all the way across the screen. But I searched for every upgrade I could find throughout the game, and the bars only increased maybe 1/10th of the way across by the end of the game. Each upgrade you find does such a miniscule amount of difference that I really had to question whether or not they were even worth worrying about.

The biggest problem I had was a glitch that occasionally caused the game to freeze. After EVERY single room, after you defeat all the enemies, there's a cut-scene of a door being unlocked. Sometimes the game will just stop mid scene, when you're not in control of your character. At this point you can't do anything but swear and push the reset button, and hope the last save point wasn't too far back.

Despite the problems, I decided to work through them and finishe the game. I can't say it completely wasn't worth it. The story-line is good, after all. And The Rock himself voiced. I wouldn't recommend paying too much for this game, however.