Achron Demo

Strategy games have evolved a great deal over the years, especially when it comes to gameplay mechanics and the like. Hence, even if people might still prefer the first StarCraft to the second and some might hold the earlier C&C episodes in high regards, they are pretty basic compared to what modern RTS games are capable of doing nowadays.

Achron is a real-time strategy game that gambled it all on a single gimmick: time travel. While it does exciting and the developers did indeed manage to get something interesting out of it, a lot of potential was wasted along the way and the game came out rather disappointing in the end. However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a shot, at least to see how nice it could have been.

The background story talks about an alien invasion from a long time ago, with you being one of the last survivors of the human race, in a way. In fact, you play the role of an ‘archornal’ being, which is capable of traveling through time at will, using some kind of powerful technology. As such, the campaign expands on that and provides you with the possibility to see how it all transpired.

As much as you might enjoy the concept of time travel and strategy games, you’ll definitely hate what Achron decided to do with it. In essence, the actual time travel is quite nice, since you have a timeline that can be altered and you have the possibility to jump back and forth on it at will. However, once you start doing so, you realize that everything is very unpolished, and it doesn’t really matter where and when you are because nothing works anyway.

The combat is terrible and the pathfinding is among the worst seen in the genre, not to mention the featureless units that look the same and feel the same. The environments are barren and lacking in detail, although most of the time they are just open plains with nothing to see for miles. To make matters worse, the graphics engine is quite old and weak as well, so not even the few objects you do get to see aren’t too impressive.

In the end, Achron came very close to being a revolution, but the developers forgot to work on the rest of the game and put all of their hopes into the time travel mechanics. Hence, although it can be mildly fun to jump backwards and forwards in time, the trick gets old in a few minutes and you are left with a weak RTS to show for it.