by Adrienne Brunner

Created on: September 12, 2008   Last Updated: September 17, 2008

Archibald's Adventures
4/5

Archibald's Adventures, by Rake in Grass, is a fun little platform game that involves innovative ideas and intuitive controls, along with fun sounds, interesting graphics and obstacles and many challenging levels.

The game starts with a story about how Archibald gets trapped in the professor's mansion and that the experiments in the mansion have gone bad, causing it to become locked down. Although it is an interesting story, it is not really necessary to the game, and it does provide a skipping method to move straight to game play.

The controls offer a variety of choices to the player, allowing the player to control Archibald's movements with the arrow keys, the A/D keys or the mouse, which means players with different preferences will be pleased with the options.

The sound is appealing, and although it starts out a bit loud, both the background music and the interesting popping sounds can be changed to an appropriate level quite easily in the options menu. Graphics are cute and fun, ranging from crazy monsters to strange acid. Archibald is a skate-boarding kid and the graphics are appealing and appropriate to the game. The obstacles range from disappearing spikes to strange flowers or animals, and the graphics found in the helpful hints in the terminals are also very detailed and helpful.

As a player passes through the levels, there is a respawning device, which offers the player the ability to return from the dead at certain spots in the level, instead of having to repeat the entire level all over again. This is favorable, as figuring out the puzzle of each level could get frustrating if the player has to return to the beginning every time.

Archibald encounters all types of dangers, such as falling acid drops, strange animals or characters and obstacles such as sealed exit doors and puzzles where he must press buttons and pull levers in a certain order. Although the levels are quickly played at the beginning, it does begin to get more challenging very quickly. The game has an excellent first level, and on most levels, there are "terminals," which give the player hints on how to finish each level or get around a certain new obstacle.

When Archibald pushes buttons or pulls levers, the screen moves to show the player what the action changed in the game, allowing the player to see if a door is now open, for example. As Archibald progresses through the levels, he gains certain intuitive and innovative powers, such as the ability to use the professor's special bubble gum to his advantage.

The trial version of this game contains 14 levels in the professor's mansion, plus 10 other levels in another location. The full-sized version contains many levels in various locations which guarantee hours of fun game play. This game is fun for all ages, fairly easily controlled and would be a definite 4/5 as it is certainly worth the price.

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