Heh. I must be the only person on the planet who wasn't impressed with FoA. I'll be lazy and copy-and-paste my main gripes with it from elsewhere (with minor tweaking), so some of you might recognize it:
I honestly don't know why
Fate of Atlantis is held in such a high regard. Even until the terrible and tedious Atlantis section (one big maze with two puzzles repeated
ad nauseam:
Spoiler:the "put pearl in hole" and the "three discs" puzzle.
), the game is pretty hit-and-miss. Granted, the branching approach was/is pretty novel, and I haven't tried the supposedly best Team path yet, but what I've seen had way too much repetitiveness and trial-and-error gameplay.
It was very straightforward - which I wouldn't mind; I think that's very fitting to a fast-paced (again, until Atlantis...) Indy's adventure. But it made the occasional guess-the-designer's-mind puzzle (eg. the parrot! I never understood this one.
) all the more jarring. And don't get me started about the final dialogue puzzle - not only is it frustratingly long series of trial and error, but also blatantly throws the whole illusion of the non-linearity, FoA's greatest asset, out of the window.
Fahrenheit has nothing on
Fate of Atlantis in terms of how disappointing the ending was.
As for repetitiveness:
Spoiler:How many flat-out mazes there are (Jungle, Outer Circle, Inner Circle)? Or large areas seen from bird's view, with lots of virtually identical rooms to visit, to find the important one (Monte Carlo, Desert, Thera)?
Enough rambling to stir the pot, I guess.
