Azurik: Rise of Perathia

It all comes down to the elemental factors, Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Life, and Death. Get your axion ready and start searching the elemental realms for the lost elemental disks. Azurik: Rise of Perathia is an epic adventure through six vast environments filled with dynamic and dangerous creatures. You must learn to control the elements and restore balance to the universe. That’s sounds simple, so lets do it.

Gameplay

The ancients had placed all of the elements together in the Temple of Elements thousands of years ago. Eldwyn, the Master Lore Guardian, along with the Junior Lore Guardians, Azurik and Balthazar, protect the elements. Balthazar becomes possessed by the Death Disk, enraged he throws a hissy fit in the temple, killing Eldwyn and sending fragments of the disks to far reaching areas of Perathia. The Staff of the Elements, known as the Axion, has special elemental powers, which become active as you progress throughout the game. The powers of the Axion are each represented by a button on the controller. For example, Water is the blue button, Fire is the red button and so on. Elements are useful for gaining entry into otherwise unreachable areas. You can use the water element to distinguish a wall of fire, or use the air element to reach higher areas. Throughout the environment, you will come across gems, which will increase the capacity of your Axion. If you’re lucky there is a Chromatic Fuel Cell, which will increase all elements of your Axion simultaneously. Later in the game, once all of the elemental powers are acquired, you will need to mix elements to defeat certain enemies and obstacles.

Navigating throughout the realms is done mainly on foot, however there are teleporters, as well as other means of travel, such as flying or riding a lift. There are many areas that require you to solve puzzles, and in the process you will need to travel to other areas of the game to locate the answer. The realms are very large, and offer many different areas to explore. The gameplay itself is non-linear, played from a third person view. For the most part, the camera is controlled by the computer, however you can take control of it with the right thumb stick. Many of the angles that the camera gives are not the angles that you need, forcing you to use it almost religiously, which becomes cumbersome and frustrating throughout the entire game. It could be said that our hero has a problem, as you are often forced to retry some of the simplest movements over and over before he gets it right, due to the poor physics and collision detection of the game.

Graphics / Presentation

Some of the realms are truly beautiful, boasting details that will amaze you. You’ll see birds and other creatures floating past, waterfalls, and caverns. A drawback to the graphics is the poorly rendered, and poorly animated characters. Lighting and shadowing effects leave a bit to be desired, as walking through a dark cave the surrounding will literally be pitch black. Use of the fire element will shed a bit of light on the area however. The introductory sequence is perfectly rendered and sets you up for the story in a convincing fashion.

Audio

The soundtrack is good, with it’s sweeping ranges of melodies and drama. Voice acting is ok, but gets droning after a short while, the creatures sounds are good as well, and following in the footsteps of the voice acting gets repetitive quick. It’s all wrapped up in Dolby Digital audio, and if it weren’t for the repetitive nature of many of the elements, would be quite good.

Replay Value

Having such vast areas, with allot of things to do, you’ll find plenty of reasons to come back to this title, but will your tolerance for frustration allow you?

Overall Score

Overall Score: 6.5 [Not an Average]

Additional Comments

Being an adventure game, it’s not uncommon that it score low in replay value, however, there are parts of the game that were really enjoyable, and parts that were quite frustrating. I would Recommend renting this title first, if you have allot of patience, it may just be right up your alley.