It is not uncommon for a socially outcast child to imagine that he is, in fact, an alien from another world, and that one day, in the middle of Social Studies, a UFO will land in the playground and take him to a planet where he fits right in. (This, by the way, is a peculiarly male dream. The female equivalent involves having a coach and six horses pull up in the school driveway ready to take their princess back to a far-flung kingdom where she will be forever glamorous and loved, not to mention ruling with an iron fist.) This fantasy is at the root of Sierra's most recent shooter/adventure thing, The Last Dynasty. But since this TWO CD-ROM product is the brainchild of the infamously weird French company Coktel Vision, you just know the story's going to take a few bizarre detours.
Actually, this is the most mainstream Coktel game yet, far more normal than Woodruff and the Schnibble, or the Inca saga. Unfortunately, that also means it's incredibly derivative, stealing licks from Star Wars, The Last Starfighter, Dune, and any other sci-fi movie they could get their hands on.
The main characters are Mel and Dok, victims of a space fantasy gone wild. The instruction manual for the game refers to them as "young boys" or "teenagers" alternately, but I'll be damned if these guys are younger than 25. After all these years, they still cling to the hope of that spaceship taking them away, and by golly, it finally does! It turns out that Mel is actually a prince (Hey, two fantasies for the price of one!), son of Lord Yannis of the Last Dynasty. Dok is the most loyal squire they could find, and his job has been to protect Mel and groom him for his homecoming. This is especially interesting when you consider that Mel and Dok have been friends since early childhood. How loyal a squire can a 2-year old be?
Anyway, all has not been going well for the Last Dynasty. The usually peaceful realm has been terrorized by a creep named Iron who comes from "the Peripheral Solar System." Iron looks like a wrestler, but his goals are surprisingly academic. He wants control of the Ultimate Knowledge, so that he can (all together now...) Rule The Universe. Yannis divided this stuff between Mel and his twin brother Lem. Unfortunately, Iron has already captured Lem and sucked the knowledge out of him. Now he's making a clone of Mel to fill in the gaps. Mel has to find this clone and destroy it. What this adds up to for the player is lots of flying around and blowing up spaceships. Yay!
While I'm sure Sierra would like us to draw lots of positive comparisons with Wing Commander III, I think it's more appropriate to call on the ghost of Coktel Vision's Inca II from last year. The graphics have greatly improved since that game, using real digitized video instead of "puppet pictures" of the actors. The music is very impressive and John Williams-y, but maybe it should have been used a bit more sparingly. Who needs a heroic theme during a moment of comic relief? Also, the flight and combat model is much better than Inca II. The ship responds faster and with greater precision, and it's a good thing, because there are a LOT more combat segments. You can even customize your ship "dashboard," picking and choosing which indicators you need and adjusting the displays to read out in digital, bar graph, or speedometer needle form.
But when it comes down to it, Inca II was a lot more fun to play than Last Dynasty. There was a strong adventure element right from the beginning, and while there is one in Dynasty, you have to space battle your way through the whole first CD to get there. If you're not a big fan of this kind of shooter, you're going to lose interest pretty quick. You are given a choice of three planets to visit, but there is only one order that lets you proceed. If you try to visit a planet out of order, you go through the combat and then nothing happens except that you are given the planet choice screen again. This is a shallow and obvious attempt to fool players into thinking that the game is not completely linear, which it is.
If you do manage to survive through to the second CD, you are treated to the adventure portion of the game. Here, as in the rest of the game, the graphics are superb. You navigate your way through a 7th Guest-type scrolling environment, and it looks great. The only problem is there's almost nothing you can interact with. There's about one or two hot spots per room, if you're lucky. And wouldn't it make sense if you could interact with the parts of a room that your eyes are naturally drawn to? Sure, but here the hot spots are almost invariably tiny shadowed areas, leaving you unable to take a closer look at the big beautiful spaceship nicely centered in your screen. What a pain. You're also saddled with a wimpy character who doesn't want to do things like enter a room if he hears people, or press a control button before he knows exactly what it does. These kinds of artificial constraints are maddening to the player who wants to try all the angles.
As with Inca II, fans of badly dubbed monster movies are in for a real treat in Last Dynasty. The original dialogue was in French, so the rhythms are all off and the lines lose a lot in translation, but they're often very funny. But Inca II was far goofier (and I mean that in a good way) with its far-out plot about Incas conquering space (in ships that reflect their interest in gold) and fighting angry Conquistadors. If you are more interested in the funky and funny than a traditional game, you'd do better to track this down than to pick up The Last Dynasty. And if you want a serious space shooter, there's no way this game can compare with Wing III.
