A decent adventure game, but it just doesn't get to that level of excitement you hope for and it's just too short.
Ancient Egypt: the teenager Assil decides to steal the key to the pyramid from his father and invites some friends for a party. In the pyramid however, Assil gets into trouble with the local mummy and he ends up with a death curse and the Ankh. With the curse taking over slowly, Assil must find a way to lift this curse before it’s too late.
So this is where the story sets off. You take on the role of Assil and you must find a way to lift the curse. This will need you to escape your father’s punishment and to walk around through Caïro to find the means of lifting this death curse. That however, will prove rather difficult since the lifting of the curse appears not to be the only problem you’ve gotten yourself into.
The game
So, the game… Well, after I finally started it (I had many, MANY difficulties with this and I hope that I was an exception), my initial impressions were positive. The game is fully in 3D and has a sort of comic style, which suits the game well, especially in combination with the humour in the game.
A point that I was less enthusiastic about however, was the way you really, REALLY had to check your surroundings for every object that could be of use to you. For example, at one point I was really stuck and I had to use a walkthrough in order to advance. In the walkthrough it said I needed to find a certain object and it even said where it was. Even with this walkthrough, it still took me about ten minutes to actually find the object! That isn’t making puzzles challenging, that’s just frustrating players.
What I also thought as a nuisance, was the constant running around in the game. You constantly have to go from one point to another, only to perform a very small task and then you have to go back again. This takes ages and if there was a way of skipping screens, I didn’t find it.
Then let me also make the last negative comment about the game (which is also the most important): the game is too small and too short, especially for the amount of money you pay for it. After progressing in the game, it became clear to me that there wouldn’t be that much more locations I would come to visit. You walk around in the city of Caïro, you get to visit the palace of the Pharao and then there are a few more locations in the desert, but basically that’s it. So the gameworld is frighteningly small. That also goes for the length of the game. If you forget the parts where you can get really stuck because you missed an object, which will take you hours to figure out without a walkthrough, and if you look past the parts where the game is just taking up time because you have to run from one place to another (which, in my opinion has nothing to do with an adventure game), the game is very short. I would say about seven to eight hours. That’s just way too short for an adventure game.
Are there only negative aspects to the game? No. Like I mentioned before, the game is (or attempts to be) pretty humorous and it has its moments. For example, at one point in the game, there suddenly appears a health bar in the upper left corner of the screen. The main character immediately makes some comments about it and after taking a few steps, someone hits him with a pebble, which brings down the health of Assil to about five percent. If this is not your kind of humour, then you will find the entire game pretty annoying. If this is your kind of humour, prepare for some laughs during the game.
The controls
The controls are very simple. You control the entire game with the mouse. When you hover the mouse over certain objects, the cursor will change, depending on what you can do with/to that object. A right mouseclick will let Assil perform this action, while a left mouseclick will let Assil examine the object, or simply walk to it. How much simpler could it get?
The graphics
A 3D game in comic style. There are games out there which have tried this and failed miserably. Ankh however, doesn’t fail in this. It really suits the game. The characters look lovable and the surroundings look good too. The graphics aren’t the comic style like the game Runaway, but different. I don’t know exactly how to further describe them; just look up some screenshots to see for yourself.
The sound
The music is decent. I especially liked the song at the ending credits, although that one also was too short. The voices are, on overall, good. The voice of Assil suits him and that goes for most of the characters. There are a few characters of which I thought the voices didn’t suit the characters, but luckily, those were exceptions to the rule. The background sounds are pretty decent too, not much to say about those, actually. So, the sound isn’t exactly the aspect which totally carries the game, but it doesn’t hinder the game either.
Overall
Like I said: the game is just way too short. There are five chapters in the game, but in my opinion the game should have at least nine or ten chapters to be a complete game. The same goes for the locations in the game: there are just way to few locations. So if the game would have been about twice as long/big, it would have been a decent adventure game. Now it’s just a very small game that is too expensive. And that’s too bad, because this game really could have been something.
You'll find that I've rated this game's difficulty as 'Hard'. That's mostly because you can get stuck very easily. And then I'm mostly talking about having missed an object or something like this.