Archeo Shinar Review — Russell Troxel

Sep 21

Sep 21 Archeo Shinar Review

I can’t figure out when it started, but at some point western media decided to depict archaeology as much cooler than it actually is. I don’t mean to say that extracting ancient artifacts and learning about long-dead humans isn’t important, it’s just not nearly as interesting as Indiana Jones fighting Nazis. But it seems the folks at Artists Entertainment wanted to more accurately reflect the stoic life of an archaeologist, so they developed Archeo Shinar.

In Archeo Shinar, players are the estranged child of a famous archaeologist who began his career as a firebrand but was slowly ground down and dulled by the limits of academic life. In his final letter before his death, he implores the player to follow the dreams he couldn’t and uncover the mysterious connection between the Tower of Babel and the Library of Alexandria. But obviously this is job is far too dangerous and taxing to accomplish on one’s own, so players are given a team of archaeologists to do all the work for them. So instead of being a daring explorer out in the world, players become a strange mixture of hiring manager, dispatcher, smuggler, press secretary, politician and property baron.

The majority of time players spend in Archeo Shinar will be in their home office where they will juggle their multitude of responsibilities. In the home office, players have nine different menus, each containing a different facet of the game. There is the Lobby, where players can review records of previous expeditions and find forecasts of what expeditions are forthcoming, the Expeditions map, where players examine what expeditions are currently available and dispatch their staff, the staff Quarters, where players train, fire and adjust the attitudes of their staff, the Labour Market, where players hire new staff, the Warehouse, where players examine the items and ancient artifacts they’ve acquired, the Merchant Company, where players purchase helpful items to send with their staff on expeditions, the Black Market, where players can buy and sell ancient artifacts, the Property Management map, where players can purchase and develop parcels of land, and the Press room, where players can sell their stories to the press and cash in favors with the influential editors of the local papers. If this sounds like a lot to manage, don’t worry because the game is happy to explain what all of these menus do and how they should be used after the player has beat a mere 80% of the story mode. I understand wanting to flesh out a game, giving players more to do while also revealing the complicated truth of managerial positions, but to lock tutorials behind story progress is baffling. By the time players get to the later tutorials, they will have likely figured out the intricacies of the systems by playing the game and at that point tutorials can only be either frustrating by revealing information players could have used hours ago or boring by covering information the player is already deeply familiar with. There is also an in-game guide to all the mechanics that can be accessed at any time, but there are very few things that arrest momentum and interest as effectively as having to stop playing the game and read a guide for ten minutes. None of the tasks in the different menus are poorly done, but it feels like the developers thought that adding more mechanics would improve their game without a thought diminishing returns or over-complexity.

Once the player has finished stumbling through the multitude of menus, it’s time to send their staff on an expedition, because in spite of everything else the game makes you do, this game is about fulfilling your father’s dreams of archaeological knowledge. The expeditions in Archeo Shinar are confusing because they defy the game’s premise. Because this game is sold as a game where players are distant managers of archaeological expeditions, why then are the expeditions themselves active tests of player reflexes and knowledge? On an expedition, the player’s staff will run into challenges that require the player to choose one or more of their staff that ideally fit whatever task is before them. This means the player must have instantaneous recall of which explorer is best at which tasks or quick reflexes to sort through their explorers and find the prime candidate. I don’t really think this system is bad, it’s just a total defiance of the rest of the game. I would much rather expeditions be a list of likely challenges and staff abilities at the start and the player receives a report of what happened at the end of the expedition. This may be less thrilling but it would at least maintain the tone of the game. Another peculiarity of expeditions is small bits of flavor text, describing moments that occur during these month-long trips. At first I thought these were great, they were fun bits of storytelling that also slowed the expeditions timer down significantly as the player read them. However, the more I played the less I liked them. I began to see the same stories over and over, making it seem that maybe a dozen were rewritten and were being recycled extremely quickly. Additionally, some of these small stories had details that seemed like they should have a massive impact on the expedition, such as a member wandering off and never being seen again, but had no actual bearing on the game.

This brings me to the final wrinkle in Archeo Shinar: the writing. I can’t find much about developers Artists Entertainment so I can’t be sure where they are from, but it seems pretty clear that English is not their first language. Obviously not every person on Earth needs to be a fluent English-speaker but when a game is full of typos, it hinders the efficacy of the narrative. And it’s really a shame that the writing is so riddled with technical flaws, because it’s telling a genuinely fun story. The characters the players meet throughout the story as well as the procedurally-generated quests and interactions player can find at the end of expeditions are entertaining and do some good world-building. Especially impressive are the fully voiced letters from archaeological rivals, setting up each new mission and providing flavor dispersed throughout. I wish Artists Entertainment had put up a bit more cash for a better translator because I want the story they’re telling to not be held back by grammatical errors and misspellings.

Though I can’t be sure, Archeo Shinar seems to be the second game created by Artists Entertainment and it shows. There are a lot of what I consider amateur mistakes covering up a genuinely interesting premise, so I hope the developers use this experience as a learning opportunity to improve their craft. The mechanics are all good enough and the story is interesting, but players do have to look beyond quite a few flaws, so while I believe it to be worth playing, I think the $12 is a bit much.