Crap Shoot: Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis

Richard Cobbett looks back at one of Lucasarts' worst ever games, and one of Indy's most unfortunate misadventures this side of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Shudder.

Where to begin? Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a godawful mess of a game by anyone's standards. It's ugly. It's boring. It's barely playable. What little plot there is gets buried instantly under the bad controls and embarrassingly poor puzzles. The interesting idea of being able to control two characters at once is utterly squandered by the fact that you won't want to spend a single second more than you have to in their company. And yet despite all this, when you mention Fate of Atlantis, you'll struggle to find anyone who doesn't have warm memories of it. They'll tell you it's one of Lucasarts' best adventures, with a great story and characters that deserved to be immortalised in an actual movie.

So what's going on? Simple. We're not thinking of that Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which is indeed fantastic. No, we're playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game.

Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game is an odd one - a cheap movie cash-in, only without the movie. It does owe its existence to one though: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was also split into two games - a SCUMM based adventure by Noah Falstein, David Fox and Ron Gilbert that wasn't great but did some interesting things, and a fairly generic cash-in platformer that didn't.

The Fate of Atlantis version took the form of an isometric action-adventure hybrid, but otherwise stuck to the stripped down (read: lazy) nature of movie ports at the time. The original adventure version was huge. The Action Game offered just six levels. The adventure featured a fun plot, with three paths designed around wits, fists, and Indy's new partner, feisty psychic Sophia Hapgood. The action game relies on the manual to tell you what you're doing and why. Most notably of all, at least on first glance, the adventure game actually has Harrison Ford's face on the cover, while the action game had to make do with a random guy in a fedora, plus a huge INDY logo to draw your eye away from the hideous artwork. It's quite clear which of the two games Lucasarts gave a damn about. And in case you're wondering, yes, the Action Game does admit that it's based on the adventure, rather than pretending the two were equals.

You know you're in trouble from the start of the first level, which drops you into a Monte Carlo casino and promptly washes its hands of you. A few enemies wander around, occasionally shuffling over to punch you in the face for a bit, but just as quickly losing interest and getting back to more important daydreaming. If you punch them, sometimes they drop sweets. You can switch between Indy and Sophia at will, with the other in either 'stop' or 'go' mode, which lets them amble around on their own random walking and face-punching adventures. Indy starts off with his whip and his fists, while Sophia gets to gently kick people in the shins until they feign death in the hope that she goes away. If either character runs out of health, they get transported into a cell without even a door to stop them simply walking out, but of course they don't do that because that would be naughty and the