Reviewed: June 15, 2003
Reviewed by: John Bowlin
Publisher
Big City Games
Developer
Techland
Released: April 10, 2003
Genre: Platform
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone
5
6
5
4
5.0
System Requirements
Indiana Jack takes place in a utopian world, called the islands of happiness, where magical animals live in harmony. However, this world is turned upside down when an evil sorcerer shows up and enslaves all of the magical animals except for one little monkey, Indiana Jack. Naturally, players will take on the role of Indiana Jack who must travel through ten lands on a quest to save the other animals and get rid of the evil sorcerer.
If this story sounds somewhat childish, that's probably because the game is clearly aimed at the younger gamers. The voice of the narrator sounds like a Mister Rogers clone. The gameplay is quite simplified, and the graphics and sounds are kept clear and clean and bright and colorful. It is a bit hard for me to put myself in the role of a younger gamer in order to give this game justice when reviewing but I'm going to try.
Indiana Jack is a fairly straightforward platform jumping action game similar in style to games like Rayman, Sonic the Hedgehog, or Crash Bandicoot. The game is quite linear, in fact for a game with a fully 3D engine the game is almost too linear in that you are stuck on an invisible "track" and more or less must travel forward the entire time. The advantage to this is you don't have to waste time wandering around, you do know exactly which way to go. The disadvantage is that it can be somewhat mundane and repetitive after a while.
Indiana Jack does not seem to support a joystick or gamepad, which is a shame because it is a game that could clearly benefit from a gamepad interface. You might be able to use one of those keyboard-to-gamepad map programs to get it to work but I didn't try this. The default control setup which is configurable assigns the movement keys to the arrow keypad, and jump is set to C, swinging fists is set to X, and throwing bananas is set to Z.
You can carry up to 10 bananas at a time and use them to throw at the magically enslaved animals who will try and thwart you from saving them. There are usually plenty of bananas to pick up along the way but sometimes you might run low on ammo and need to instead go hand to hand with the animals by swinging Indiana's fists. Jumping in the air and landing on them while you have the X button pressed will also work to knock out the animal. The animals usually do not actively seek out Indiana Jack; they just kind of wander around on their preset paths and if you happen to run into them you lose some health.
You can be hit by animals or falling things up to four times before you lose a life. You regain lives by collecting magical stars. If you collect 100 stars you get a new life. Also there are magical oranges you can find that will give you a life. You can also find magical cupcakes, which will turn on a short invincibility mode so that Indiana Jack can breeze through the animals at top speed. There also are sometimes doctor’s bags, which can regenerate lost health points.
The game's main challenge comes from platform jumping puzzles. You'll have places where you have to make several timed jumps just at the right time to keep from falling. Falling into water will take a life away from you and put you back at the last waypoint. The jumping puzzles can take some time to master correctly because the controls are not entirely precise, sometimes it seems like pure luck is required to jump at the right times to make it past these.
There are magical signs that you will find along the way which act as waypoints where you can save your progress. This lets you quit the game and then come back to where your last waypoint was. However, if you lose all of your lives, the game is over and you have to start all the way back at the first world. Playing carefully and not getting into too big of a hurry is the best way to keep your life count up high, but sometimes you might get stuck on a particularly hard jumping puzzle and lose the game. The game is completely linear; you only have one path to take through each of the ten lands.
Occasionally at the end of one of the lands you will encounter a boss monster that you must fight. These usually can be taken down with bananas and doing a lot of dodging. These bosses provide a different kind of challenge to break up the monotony of all of the jumping puzzles. The really downside to the game is that once the game is over by running out of lives, you have to start all the way back at the first world and it can take a long time of monotonously playing the easier levels just to get back to the point that actually posed a challenge to you. Having some way to actually save which land you died in and starting from there would have been much better, but perhaps with only 10 lands the developers thought that people would finish the game too soon.
After I reached the 8th world, however, Indiana Jack became terribly unstable and it began to crash multiple times. It was at this point where I had to eventually give up playing even though I had accumulated plenty of lives. It would just lock up and I would have to press CTR-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager in Windows XP and then kill the game's task and restart over from my last waypoint. I suppose I could have kept going at it in the hopes of getting past whatever was causing all the lockups, but by this time I was pretty familiar with the game's gameplay and didn't feel it was worth a lot of headache to finish it.
The graphical style of Indiana Jack is typical of most platform jumping games. There is plenty of flash and color for the animals and their environments. There is a frozen motif that runs through the first part of the game; in fact one of the first bosses you'll encounter is an evil snowman. Later on you'll fight a tree-man and the land will have lots of rivers to cross with fish jumping. Eventually you'll find your way through jungle areas full of tropical life.
The animations are fairly smooth most of the time, which is good because you need to be able to judge when to press attack keys at the exact right moment in order to successfully knock out the enslaved creatures. At times it seemed like the game didn't have the timing down properly as to when your on screen avatar connected with one of the animals and so it seemed that at times you would die when you really shouldn't have.
Even at the game's highest resolution, 1024x768, with the graphics settings set to the highest possible, the game ran very smoothly. The graphics were still a bit blocky at this mode, however. Some of the models for the creatures looked a bit too blocky at times, or items in the landscape were not rounded and smooth like you may have come to expect if you play this type of game on the consoles. Overall Indiana Jack does not offer any spectacular graphical effects, but it is competently done.
The music for Indiana Jack is quite up beat and energetic, fitting into the themes of each of the lands that you must traverse. It isn't really that memorable of music but it doesn't really annoy you as you play which is good. The sound effects are somewhat sparse, but the game does have sounds of the bears and lions growling, the splashing of the fish jumping, or the sounds of other animals such as the frogs and various birds.
Of course Indiana Jack proclaims "okay! okay!" if you get a new life, and then there is the low key matter-of-fact announcer who tells you "it is time to go to another land" at the end of each level. Indiana Jack isn't going to win any awards for its music or sound effects, but they were okay.
I am not sure exactly how long it would take to finish Indiana Jack since the game locked up on me after world 8, but it took less than two hours to get to that point. Replay on a harder difficulty level might be a possible way to extend gameplay time with this title. Still, it's not a very long game and it is quite linear so it is unlikely that the game will have a lot of replay value for most gamers. The up side to this is that the game is a budget priced title at only $20 list price.
Overall Indiana Jack does have its moments of fun, especially when you are racing through the levels with the invincible mode on smashing all in your path. The game has low budget production values to accompany its low budget price, which may be appropriate if that's the kind of game you're interested in. Realistically this game's primary audience is for the younger gamers, but even adults could find some fun here if they look hard. The crashing problems really detracted from the game, though, and for that I can't really make a strong recommendation for this title.
- Editor's Addendum
When it comes to games aimed at pre-teens and younger I always try to get some "inside info" from the target audience; mainly my 6yr old neice Tori, a veteran of such platform games as Sonic, Ecco, Taz, and her absolute favorite, Rayman. Her comments (paraphrased of course); she did not like the forced camera angle that made platform jumping way too tricky and she didn't like the keyboard controls.
I tried setting up my gamepad using keyboard mapping software, and while this worked to some extent the game never achieved the console "feel" to match the console gameplay and visual style. After playing about halfway through the first level she announced she was ready to play Rayman some more.
Hey! If you can't trust a 6yr old, who can ya trust?