Achron Reviews

Don't be fooled. This game might look interesting with its time travel mechanic, but that's precisely where the interest ends. It might be interesting if an actual [i]good[/i] RTS used these mechanics, but instead we have this. It's as if the developpers spent all of their time working on the time travel mechanic and simply ran out of time to make the rest of the game up to par. However, if you are interested in video game design, then I would in fact recommend this game as a learning experience. Pick it apart, see where it fails, come up with a better system to utilize the time travel mechanic, possibly.

I'm sad I can't recommend this game. Although I love the main concept, it's shortcommings and extreme lack of polish end up beeing to much for me. I hope someone picks up this idea to try it again in the future.

Achron is, as other reviews put it, an incredible demo of the Resequence Engine, which is effectively a monstrosity of a database that allows a game to rebuild its world state at any point along a specified chunk of time for freeform time travel and manipulation of causality. It is also, as other reviews put it, incredibly tiresome. Having read a little of the developer's AMA on the subject, it's pretty clear the technology of 10 years ago left them with precious little headroom to design crucial elements of the RTS experience, such as unit pathfinding and awareness, which leaves the game feeling frustratingly unresponsive at the best of times. Everything about the time travel system is incredibly well thought out and manages to be mostly intuitive after some time with the game, which is a feat in and of itself, but the commands, graphical design, and UI all remain very rough, as do the campaign scripting and map design. More than once in the campaign I have quit out of frustration at the game just not doing anything I ask it to and expecting me to use time travel to reattempt jockeying my units around a cliff in time to avoid being slaughtered, one by one, by a comparatively smaller enemy force. So, why am I recommending the game? Well, it's because nothing like it has come in 10 years, and the engine is brimming with untapped potential. I think more people need to see this game for what it is and ask that either the developers use today's hardware to rethink and remaster it... or someone, Hazardous Software or otherwise, takes this engine and does it justice with a different game. Hazardous Software has a few other products on offer, but they largely suffer from the same pattern of flaws: implementation in a very harsh resource environment with a bad sense of aesthetics and UI. They seem to have largely moved on to pitching the engine to corporations and military, because it's very, very good for intuitively visualizing emergent change in complex nonlinear systems. If anyone sees this today, I ask that you give this game a look, give it a ton of patience, look past all the ugliness, and try to imagine what could be done with legitimate, solid, freeform time travel. I'd love to see something like XCOM done with Resequence.

Achron is a very interesting concept for a strategy game. If you like seeing entirely new mechanics for games, Achron is definitely something to pick up. However, obvious pitfalls make this game incredibly...tiresome. [b]The Good:[/b] The time mechanics in the game are interesting, and [b]mostly[/b] intuitive. Travelling throughout a 7 minute time period (5-6 minutes behind, 1-2 minutes ahead), you can see things that have happened, and can [b]actually[/b] change the events that have happened. If you have problems with understanding, "What happened with that group?" you can just rewind to see why that occurred. The interface is also intuitive enough so you can understand when some things happen. Movement, orders, and normal actions doesn't deviate from the norm in top-down strategy games, so a player that plays other top-down strategy (Supreme Commander, Command & Conquer, etc.) will not see any kind of problems getting into this game. [b]The Bad:[/b] The interface needs some serious tweaks to understand your actions, and what your actions in the timeline are affecting. Its also extremely hard to tell when your changes are getting propagated to the present when it has nothing to do with unit on unit combat. If you (or another time traveller) jumps back to the past, makes a change, and you (in the future), could see a change that doesn't exactly make sense (such as a building or unit not getting built). While you do have the ability to jump into the past and see the changes why, the user interface incredibly lacks when, why and how things are getting modified. Pathing in this game is also a joke. Most games, you can just right-click the location and they will path around obstacles. However, in Achron, if you right click on the right side of the map, and in the center is a one-entrance gully, which they have to go to the North or South to avoid, they will enter the gully, and get stuck on the eastern edge of the gully and stop, without trying to repath. Also, groups have hard times keeping together, since formations do not exist. Friendly "nudging" to get out of the way of a building being built, or a tank trying to get through a line of friendly soldiers, does not exist. Even with this garbage pathing, one unit can only have five orders active at one time. The unit creation queues are also a joke. You can manage it once its in the queue effectively, and the queue is hard to understand, with health bars on the queue for some odd reason. Its hard to tell if something is made for a purpose or not, and the creation of buildings with the wrong unit mentions "at a higher cost," but fails to tell you how much it costs. Also, if you place down one building, that area is not "reserved" for other friendly units to not build buildings on that spot, so you'll run into the issue that you might build where a building is going to go. The fact that you can't stop Major characters from moving to repair/help build unless they are leagues away annoys me considerably. I can't count the times in which the main characters (that aren't supposed to die) broke formation to heal a front-line unit, and ended up getting killed, requiring me to go back in time to tell them run away. Teleporters are also really terrible. Rather than teleporting units as close as possible to the specified point, they are teleported anywhere within a 20 block radius from the chosen point, creating problems that units end up on top of impassible terrain, or in the middle of canyons, unable to get out, even with a nearby teleporter. The game also takes control too early for major objectives, using the simulated "future time" (1-2 minutes in the future) to determine when an objective is finished. Because of this, it causes major characters to die because the computer takes control of the characters and moves them out of formation, requiring you to go back in time to rectify it after the unskippable cutscene ends. Also, unskippable cutscenes (which doesn't pause the game while doing it) in game. [b]The Ugly:[/b] Its evident that they worked on the time-manipulation system for 90% of the time. Maps are built incorrectly; they have impassible 85 degree inclines with textures that resemble a rock formation rather than walls that are textured properly. The large walls, which are blended together with the floor patterns, make the inside of ships and buildings look like outside with just really steep walls. Voice acting and story, I would say that its really dumb. Okay, that's being generous, the storyline is probably one of the weakest things in the game. Game introduces Tyr, an AI, but people talk to it like a person when it comes out, makes it confusing when Tyr is introduced as an AI later on. When you encounter another AI later on, everyone treats that same type of AI as the enemy, despite Tyr being that same type of AI. Events in the game occur in reasonable order, instead things happen that suit what the storyline needs at that point in time. Even when a chapter switches, which makes you go to another race and control it (ala Starcraft), is disjointed, problematic, anti-climactic and dumb. Character moods are inconsistent, and flat. Voice acting is lifeless, and I find myself skipping cutscenes just so I don't have to listen to characters that I don't care about drone on and on, making me more sleepy than when Ben Stein is talking. [b]Overall:[/b] Achron is a great and new game element into a game that would be great as a concept game, but fails to excite with lackluster AI, UI, Storyline and Voice Acting. 3/10.

If you are looking for a interesting experience this is your game, if you are looking for polish, not so much. It was difficult to maintain control and diferenciate units. It does have a good story, but the dificulty level curve and difficulty with the interface (not the time travel interface) made me take a long time to beet it as I had to take extended breaks from it.

This is a very original RTS, the time travel mechanic is very well done and fun to use, but the game could use more polish and there are a few bugs.

A bad RTS, but a great demo of the Resequence Engine. I really can't recommend this as an RTS, it just suffers from too many problems. Lack of visual clarity, bad pathfinding, dull textures, mediocre core gameplay... Which is a real shame, as the central time-travel mechanic is amazing and almost single-handedly makes up for the rest of the game. Considering the multiplayer community is now dead, I would only recommend picking this up if you have friends to mess around with or a masochistic longing for the campaign mode (which suffers pacing problems).

I don't want to be too mean to this game; the time travel mechanics are well thought out, interesting, ingenious, and have emergent consequences with strategic implications. That said, there is the MASSIVE issue that the game is basically unplayable, especially to a newcomer. There's a lot of things that are just kind of broken with the game. - The pathing is really bad; units that are ordered as a group to move will inevitable fan out into a giant line, even if it leaves them vulnerable. - The interface is pretty confusing relative to the sheer complexity of the mechanics. - Although theoretically the time travel takes the focus off of the whole RTS APM thing, in practice it doesn't seem much better; the literal pause doesn't actually stop the timewaves, or your opponent, from moving. - The graphics are pretty bad, in a way that personally made it more difficult for me to play, and my library is largely filled with faux 8bit games. But even aside from that, there is a major problem because here are 2 major modes: story, and PvP/multiplayer. Now, the first steps of the campaign are played with the human faction, which apparently back when the game was still being updated were actually kind of overpowered and were nerfed. This makes the first mission very difficult; you need to get lucky to succeed. The second mission is even worse; I'll admit I'm not amazing at the game, since I'm not a big RTS player, but it is near impossible unless you already fundamentally understand the game, before being introduced. Of course, you could try the multiplayer. if you find someone who already plays to teach you, you might even learn the game. (Writing this review made me saltier than I realized it would) I love Achron as a concept, but I cannot possibly recommend it as a game. It has lots of flaws, and it has a learning curve that makes Dwarf Fortress look friendly and approachable.

This game shows a highly innovative, I'd even say genius mechanic of time travel in a real-time strategy - something no one has done before or since (up to 2015). In short, you can give orders to units in the past and in the future, and there are "update waves" which travel at about 3x faster than normal time. Also you can teleport units across the battlefield with teleporters and into the past/future with chronoporters. So, basically, you can do tricks by sending units into the past to help their older doubles and so on - use your imagination. This sounds like an amazing game decades ahead of its time, but sadly its poorly designed tutorial and heavily scripted missions will turn off most players and make them drop the game in frustration. I heard good things about multiplayer but you won't find anyone thru the lobby, only thru forums of this game's fans, which are in short supply. I could endure only the demo and 3 missions, even restarted the game and played them once again to understand the mechanics better. And though I did understand how this game works with some effort, I doubt many gamers even would. Too many units are introduced too fast. The tutorial popups ask you to do stuff but don't let you do it before you press OK which actually hides the instructions about what you need to do. The scripted events take control off from you unexpectedly, place new units and give orders to other units, creating even more confusion than the already complex time-traveling system. While the control is taken away from you, characters are talking and the battle goes on. This feels like a nuthouse. Sometimes you aren't even sure if what has just happened is a bug, a scripted event or a game mechanic in action. I found the story trashy, though if you have nostalgic feelings for Star Wars (I don't), you may find it ok, as even the main character has the name "Luke". The 2D art is amateurish and, together with this Star Wars-like setting gives this game a "trashy" feel, like it was a school project done by teenagers - while the ingenuous combat system of this game deserved so much more. The 3D units are hard to tell from each other. The ground is covered with big uniform textures taken from some free online libraries, with strange lighting and huge, almost unit-sized bumps and long black shades in which smaller units get lost. The huge low-polygonal terrain objects look ugly next to tiny, much more detailed units. The air units hover so high above that you can't see where exactly they are located in relation to ground units (and their shades are shifted) - and where you need to bring your anti-air units so that they could fire at those air units. The controls are clumsy, the GUI is poor, with too few tips. The music is pretty good though. The game introduces an interesting mechanic of grouping units with hierarchies of command - which also allows you to save on orders while giving orders in the past or the future (the number of orders you can give is limited by "chronoenergy"). But hierarichies don't work well, as units following a leader don't have a fixed formation, tend to spread and walk in ever expanding crowds which leads to edge units getting killed with no one helping them because the rest of the formation is out of range and won't come to assist other units in the formation. Save files get corrupted and don't load, so if you fail (e.g. in the very first mission 8+ marines must survive in a fight which comes unexpectedly) you may have to restart the whole mission. Missions are long and heavily scripted, sometimes the instructions are given while you are busy fighting and fail to concentrate. Voice acting is amateurish and lifeless, as if the actors were bored/annoyed with the story as much as I did. When you click on the timeline (an innovative tool to show the battlefield's states up to 5 mins ago and after), it takes the game 1-2 seconds to load the state of the battlefield at that time point which makes the whole thing feel clumsy, especially when you are already stressed by struggling with this complex game and its heavily script-influenced mission objectives. Btw I bought the game some time in 2014 and it had all graphics glitched on my laptop (AMD Radeon HD 7670M video card), but it finally ran on my new desktop computer which has GeForce GTX 970. I think the devs need to try a Kickstarter campaign to get funding for Achron 2 and make a proper game on the same concept this time. [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]

The first time I played this I sat there for 6 hours working my way through the campaign. I stopped when I literally got a headache. But I was hooked. It plays about as complex as you might expect a game with time travel to play. It manages it with a timeline you can view 5 minutes forward or back or anywhere in between. You click back 30sec and you change an order, then click back to the present and everything is the same. But then time waves come into it, they move slightly faster than the passage of time and wash over the timeline from start to finish and collect and propagate changes from the past to the future. So that change you made 30sec ago, you would see a wipe go over your screen in about 20sec and if it was a large difference in orders then things would change. [u]This opens up unique solutions to problems...[/u] -Create 5 units, skip ahead in time 30 seconds to when they are finished and send them to a task. Skip back to the present and continue your base preperations. -Attack fails on an enemy base? Go back in time and build more units to send. When the time wave propagates then you will see a successful attack. -Theres a rock/paper/scissors weak against/strong against thing happening with units in this game. So if you find yourself being decimated then you can jsut go back and change the composition of units in a squad and sit back and enjoy victory. -Enemy attacking you? You will see which direction they came from. Go back in time a minute, build more troops, and send troops in their direction to intercept. Your base is saved. [u]But your enemy also has access to this time manipulation also. [/u] -Your troops find a large group of enemies and are outnumbered, go back in time and send more. You win. But with the next passing timewave you notice your troops sitting unharmed doing nothing. Your enemy went back in time and canceled the order to send the troops out so now you found nothing. -You attack and destroy an enemy base. Your enemy goes back in time 1 minute before this happens and sends air units to destroy the factory that created the units that will destroy your base. When the time wave propagates, you notice your attack suddenly is failing (all your units that were made from that factory no longer exist). You go back in time and cancel the attack to keep your troops near to defend the base. Your enemy goes back in time and cancels the air unit's movement as there is no longer a need to destroy the factory. [b]Does your head hurt yet?[/b] You will be glad to hear there is a limit. As you use a regenerating resource called chronoenergy to send orders to troops in the past or future. Go back too far and one order takes more than a full bar or chronoenergy. So that is the logistical limit. You have hierachies so that one order can concievebaly control 30+ units but there is a hard limit. [b]Want to hurt your mind more? Yes I thought so.[/b] You have heard of teleporting. Which is in the game by the way. But what about chronoporting? This is the process of sending units forward or back in time. [u]Which creates deliciously complex solutions to problems....[/u] -Oh god the base is being attacked! You only have 5 tanks and no time to make more units. Go to the chronoporter and send all the units back in time 15 seconds. Time jumps back 15sec, you now have 10 tanks. The originals and the time clones. Just make sure to protect the original 5 tanks, as they must survive the battle in order to go to the chronoproter and go back in time. Aaagh -Send back 10 units one minute. Have them in a hierachy beforehand. Then assign them to an existing squad. You will suddenly have unprecedented firepower for that stage of the game. But you gotta weigh your options. Is it worth pouring all those resources into the early game??? Aaaagh -Out of the three races, one can chronoport without using a structure. They do it on a unit basis. This is the most mind boggling feature in my opinion. You can actually avoid conflicting forces by chronoporting back in time a minute right before you begin your attack. If you chose the right spot then you will begin your attack before you first arrived at the base. AAAAAGH So you need to study before this game is fun. It is not quite dwarf fortress diffuculty curve but it's up there and a clear reason why it was not as popular as other RTS games. Another thing that contributed to that is it was a bit buggy at first and the pathfinding took a lot of updates to make right. It completely changed the way I play any other game. I sat down for a game of age of empires and after an unsuccessful raid I began looking to reverse my action and bolster my troops. I felt the mentality bleeding into my life and in an uncanny moment I snapped back into the realization that I live within time. [b]Any game that makes me lose sense of reality, even for a bit get the big thumbs up from me. I'd highly reccomend this game to people who want to think and can see through complexity to do so. [/b]