Tarr Chronicles (PC/FullIso/Multi)
Game Platforme(s) : PC | Language : Multi | Release Date : Sep 18, 2007
Publisher : GamersGate | Developer : Akella | Genre : Sci-Fiction / Space Combat Sim
Size : 1.09 Gb
English teachers should stay far away from Tarr Chronicles. Actually, let's go a little bit further and extend that caution to, well, everybody. Mangled English is probably the least of the problems afflicting this arcade-style space simulation from Russian developer Quazar Studio. Dull, repetitive missions make this one tough game to endure for very long, even when you're not puzzling over what the hell is going on due to the absolutely bizarre dialogue.
Despite Tarr Chronicles already being published in Europe earlier this year with the subtitle Sign of Ghosts, publisher Paradox Interactive put no effort into cleaning the game up for the English-speaking marketplace. This isn't the usual Russian game with garbled adjectives and no concept of how to properly use pronouns, though. On the contrary, the game's grammar is generally pretty good as far as these Russian translations go. Most of the words seem to be in the right place. But they often don't make any sense. So you get surreal descriptions like the one calling one race of creatures "anisotropic" and "multiplied in Mirrors and antiquantums." Um, yeah. Unintentionally funny phrases litter the text, too. Good luck keeping a straight face when you're assaulted by lines like "The Executioner got us all out. Like puppies from a boiling cauldron." Sorry, but, uh, yuck.
Not surprisingly, this makes the story in the solo campaign (there are no multiplayer options) impossible to follow. You're a human pilot stranded a long way from home in the far future, and the big enemy is some sort of "anti-elemental" force called the Mirk that is consuming all life in the galaxy, but beyond that the plot amounts to an alphabet soup of goofy sci-fi words like "De'Khete," "Sia'Nues," and "Varkarru." Events are hard to comprehend even when the bizarre terminology is skipped for stuff you can actually find in a dictionary. It's as if Quazar forgot to translate every second sentence, leaving you adrift in a sea of anecdotes and comments for which there is no point of reference. Pilots constantly drop names you've never heard of before and talk about unidentified "he's" and "she's" as if they were your best pals. It always seems like you're being dropped into the middle of conversations. Even the background information accessible in your cabin between missions is nonsensical. The encyclopedia refers to factions and events that remain otherwise unexplained, and your own personal log-book, presumably a journal of your experiences in the war against the Mirk, cites events that never happened and gives "war is hell" emotional heft to what seem to be lighthearted arcade furballs.
Even when there is a specific purpose to your sorties, you still don't do anything more than zip around blasting enemy craft with energy beams and missiles. This all gets extremely mind-numbing in short order, due largely to the excessive number of opposition ships and the subpar artificial intelligence. While it's dreary enough to have to destroy a dozen or more enemy fighters in each and every mission, the bad guys make your task even more annoying by flying about in circles waiting for you to target them. It seems like the only way you can lose is when objectives are partially out of your control, as in the missions where you have to protect an allied capital ship from withering enemy fire and simply can't blast the baddies to bits fast enough. Thankfully, these moments aren't all that common, although they do occur often enough to make you curse the save system that stores your progress only at the end of what are typically multipart mission segments. Since the tougher objectives always occur at the tail end of these sections, failure typically means a lot of backtracking. Overall, there isn't a great deal of challenge on offer here, just endless repetition. The game tries your patience more than your flying skills and marksmanship.
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