Gone with the Timewave: Achron Impressions Part I

Warning: This review contains some mechanical spoilers but only minimal narrative spoilers.

If I could travel through time, I’d go back to when I first got interested in Achron and kick myself. Then I’d give past-me a stern lecture.

“Haven’t you learned not to get suckered in by hype?”

“But Achron looks so interesting! Achron could be to RTS games what Braid was to puzzle-platformers! Just imagine: real-time strategy that actually emphasizes careful strategization rather than rush tactics and throwing a battalion of tanks against everything!”

Future-me would then shake his head at seeing how naïve he once was. He’d then go on to ask: “But what about the RTS core?”

“What about it?”

“Think about buildings. Isn’t the ability to capture and sell them useful?”

“Well, yeah, but that’s usually only done when sabotaging or rushing the enemy, right?”

“Okay, but what about the fact that you can’t sell your own buildings?”

“What?”

“If you want to remove a building, you’ll have to force fire on its position to destroy it.”

“That’s kind of weird, but I guess I can live with it.”

“Well, what about the story? What if I told you that there aren’t many FMVs and that Achron‘s mission briefings contained no animation?”

“I guess FMVs can be too expensive to produce for an indie developer like Hazardous Software, but what do you mean when you say no animation? You mean like in StarCraft, where the briefings were just a bunch of talking heads overlayed on a mostly static background?”

“No, no, the backgrounds for the briefings in Achron are like slideshows. I mean the characters; the character portraits in Achron don’t animate.”

“So it’s one of those games where the story is delivered by text boxes?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of text, but no, there are actually voice overs for the briefings.”

“Huh.”

“Hey, you remember Metal Gear Solid?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember how the codec conversations had the character portraits move their lips by shifting a few pixels around?”

“Yep.”

“Achron doesn’t even do that. You could recreate its conversations by just using cardboard cut-outs and a spotlight.”

“Wow.”

Flap some lip pixels for goodness' sake!

And then past-me would be silent. After thinking for a moment, he would say: “I’m not going to cry about the story. Even the Command & Conquer series, one of my favorite RTS franchises, didn’t have the greatest stories. For the most part, they just served to show you that you were incrementally advancing towards the main goal of toppling the big bad. It wasn’t about the story; I enjoyed the C&C games for the great unit affirmations, the artful units and buildings, the beautiful environments, and the visceral gameplay.”

“First off, there are no unit affirmations whatsoever in Achron. None. Zip. Zero.”

“It’s nice to have those, but I can handle their absence.”

Undeterred, future-me would continue: “Secondly, the graphics for units and buildings are serviceable, but the overuse of your team’s color can make it hard to distinguish units apart from just a glance. This is no Red Alert 2, where units looked and sounded distinctly different, and you’ll need to memorize shapes and silhouettes in Achron in order to tell what’s what. Thirdly, the environments are okay, but not great. They’re comprised almost exclusively of rocks, dirt, snow, and deserted metal buildings. This, combined with a lack of contextualization for the interstitial texts, just doesn’t establish a sense of a world existing outside the bounds of the battlefield, irrespective of how much the tangential information and backstory might try to inject life and history into this universe.”

Hope you like green text!

At this point, past-me would start becoming seriously concerned and distraught. He’d then tentatively ask: “Is there anything that’s good about the game? I mean, they can’t polish a complete turd to seem as good as it did in the trailers and previews, can they?”

Future-me would then try to cheer him up. “Hey, it’s not all bad. At least the gameplay has some highlights! The main thing is that, while the time travel ideas might initially seem complex, the mechanics are actually quite easy to learn and integrate into your strategies. The absolutely excellent timeline, a user interface feature that summarizes past, present, and future events in the form of colored bar graphs, facilitates the learning process wonderfully. By just following the tutorials found in the first campaign of Achron, you’ll find that this feature is very simple to use and understand. You’ll be reading the metaphorical digital rain and treating the timeline as just another UI element in no time flat!”

Pictured: The wonderfully useful and informative timeline.

Past-me would then be cheery as future-me would excitedly spout on about the gameplay: “The time manipulation allows for a number of great abilities and tweaks to standard RTS gameplay. Let me give examples of a couple of scenarios. Instead of needing to sacrifice a unit in order to scout enemy territory, you could just: order a unit to infiltrate the enemy encampment, skip ahead on the timeline to the part when it actually gets there, take in the information that you see, jump back to the present, and then finally cancel the unit order so that it never fulfills its suicide mission. It’s like having the power of scrying in an RTS! But there are many more implications to having time manipulation in an RTS. One of my favorite implications is the ability to bring in reinforcements from the future. Let’s say that enemy forces are encroaching upon your base and that you don’t have enough defenses to fend them off. In this situation, you can: send what you do have at the moment to tangle up the approaching forces, build more units while enemies whittle down your defenses, and then finally chronoport the whole lot of them into the past to have the invaders meet a much stronger defensive force. Even just chronoporting the forces you already have on hand can effectively double the strength of your battalion in a matter of seconds! Achron’s deep time manipulation capabilities even have a contingency plan for the grandfather paradox; the timeline will fluctuate between two possible states before finally choosing one or the other before the event falls off the edge of the timeline.

The most common use of time travel is going back in time to change events in your favor, but it suffers from a flaw stemming from how Achron was designed. One of the biggest benefits of including time manipulation in games like Braid and Chronotron is that it allowed players to undo, rewind or otherwise make mistakes inconsequential. These abilities were useful in those games because of the way those games were designed, because they often hinged their challenge or difficulty on executing a sequence of actions in a precise manner. It was also because resetting a challenge involved wasting time and effort by returning to one of a finite number of checkpoints or to the beginning of a level. The limitations previous games imposed allowed rewinding to waste less time and effort than simply resetting.

Achron is similar to those games in that autosaves essentially establish checkpoints every so often, but, like various other RTS games, Achron also allows the player to manually save at any time so long as they have access to the battlefield. Artificially imposed restrictions are what made rewinding and rerecording useful in other games, but since Achron lacks such restrictions, save scumming often ends up being much faster and much more efficient than rewinding in various situations. The renewable resource of Chronoenergy is used to make changes in the past, but large amounts of it are necessary to alter many units’ orders at once or to alter events closer towards the left edge of the timeline. By contrast, if you carefully manage your manual saves, save scumming is far less consequential and time-consuming than trying to repair things in real-time by rewinding and then tediously waiting for periodic time waves to propagate changes forward.”

“So even the time travel component has its flaws?”

“Yeah, but it’s still very well done nonetheless. It’s one of my all-time favorite implementations of time travel in video games, even if it’s surrounded by a lot of sub-par stuff. Think of it as finding a big, gleaming diamond amidst a bin full of dirty coal. Also, I surmise that this issue is completely absent in multiplayer matches since I assume that save scumming is impossible there.”

“Wait, surmise? Assume?”

“I’m not from the distant future, just the near future. Limited Chronoenergy and all that jazz. I’ve only completed about one-fifth of Achron’s campaign offerings so far.”

“So is there hope that Achron could get better?”

“Yeah, the other two factions, aliens known as the Grekim and Vecgir, seem much more interesting than the Terran-like human faction of the first campaign. Won’t know for sure until I try them out though.”

“Okay. Is there anything else that makes the game special or different from other games in the RTS genre?”

“There are a few more nifty things. A commander / hierarchy feature allows the alleviation of micromanagement when utilized. A filter that imitates visual degradation when one manipulates the distant past on the timeline wonderfully hammers home the feeling of going out of the bounds of recorded time. I was pleased to find that blowing up the in-game representation of the time manipulation hardware didn’t cause a typical and boring automatic mission failure but instead imposed a strict limitation on your UI from that point forward in time. Buildings known as importers for the human faction were logical as units were teleported in and then assigned jobs rather than materialized out of minerals and thin air like they are in C&C, StarCraft, and some other RTS games. Many units don’t have crippling overspecialization and often can attack both air and ground units regardless of their role in combat. Plenty of hotkeys exist for various unit and construction commands. And finally, Achron has made me think about the role of player characters quite a bit because it is out of the norm.”

In general, the hotkeys are great and easy-to-remember. For instance, if you want to Build a Defensive Turret, you could just select a Mech (a construction unit with offensive capabilities) and hit B then D to have the building placement ready to go.

“Out of the norm how?”

“Even if player characters in other games have their own goals and motivations, they rarely conflict with the player’s. Additionally, player characters tend to be more reactionary and malleable than free-willed. This is not the case with Achron‘s player character, as it seems to have motivations independent of yours and is privy to more information than you are. You look through this character’s eyes, yet they still feel distinct and separate from you. At times, the player character even takes control away from you in order to perform certain actions, severing the element of interactivity and further making it seem like a separate entity.  All this combines to make it feel as if you were suffering from dissociative identity disorder, and it’s a rare but very intriguing character to play because of that.”

“Sounds like it could still be a worthwhile experience.”

“The timeline and time manipulation stuff is phenomenal for sure, but since so many other things just don’t measure to those two excellent aspects, the overall experience feels underwhelming. Considering that the aforementioned issues don’t show up in many other games, and especially since Achron has been in development for over a decade where much of this could have been learned and ironed out, the various issues grated on me and negatively impacted my enjoyment of the game. I’m going to continue playing Achron for a while to see if later campaign missions or the multiplayer redeems it, but I find it difficult to recommend right now.”

“So that means the game’s at least functional if not necessarily fun, right? I mean, you wouldn’t be able to continue if the gameplay was fundamentally broken.”

Future-me would then chuckle before adding: “Well, there’s this one issue with the controls, and it’s particularly aggravating due to its relation to a critical component of RTS gameplay. The pathfinding in this game is quite sketchy, and it seems like units try to take the shortest route to the location specified, even if that route is blocked off and doesn’t actually lead to successfully navigating to the destination. You just can’t trust your units to make it more than a short distance on their own, so micromanagement and manual waypointing is a necessity.”

“What? Now you’re just pulling my leg. There’s no way they could screw up something so integral to playing an RTS. I don’t believe you.”

“See for yourself.”

“Fine! I will!”

And then future-me would smirk before disappearing as suddenly as he arrived. As past-me would stand there, contemplating whether or not a future version of himself would lie to a past version of himself, one thought would come to override all others: “Damn! I should have asked him next week’s lottery numbers!”