A decent budget action game that will satisfy many gamers, yet is somewhat lacking in detail and environmental interaction.

Archangel is a budget title for action gamers, published by JoWood Productions. You control Michael, a guy who survives a car crash and wakes up in a monastery to find out he is needed to fight the ever growing forces of darkness. It’s not a unique premise, granted, but the action can make up for it.

As Michael, you are a servant of the Lord of Light. At the onset of your voyage, you are introduced to the Lord of Light and he gives you the option of receiving powers of a Warrior or a Ghost. As the Warrior, you are granted supernatural strength and your skin is like rock. As the Ghost, you are weaker, but you are nearly invisible and can cast a ring of fire that emanates from you, damaging all within the radius of effect. Once you choose, you can enable this secondary form for a short period of time based on your spirit energy.

Spirit energy is a regenerating meter – although it regenerates very slowly – displayed on the HUD. You use it when you swing a special sword and it continuously drains when you change into your other form. There are also other spirit energy abilities you can “purchase” with Essence.

Essence acts as your experience points, allowing you to upgrade existing abilities or add new ones to your repertoire, such as seeing in the dark, health regeneration, protective shield, etc. You receive Essence points for completing objectives and killing minions of the darkness.

From the interface, you can access a log book that shows you all the enemies you’ve come in contact with and how much Essence you acquired for killing each one. You can also review your objectives.

When you start the game, you are in a more medieval time. Your weapons consist of a knife, a light sword, a heavy sword, an axe, a bow and arrow, and your magical sword (that is needed to defeat boss creatures). The bow and arrow have normal arrows, flame arrows, and ice arrows. Some items you’ll find laying around randomly within the levels, while others will be dropped by defeated enemies.

An important item that enemies will drop is a health pack. Health packs are used automatically when you’re low on health, so it’s a good idea to stock up if you can. You can use them manually from the inventory screen as well.

As Michael, your first major task is to find three magical stones. You can explore the environment in a fairly non-linear way, searching for these stones. The environments are broken up into small sections. The first chapter of the game consists of gothic architecture, caves, forests, and swamps. After you find the three stones, you’ll move on to modern architecture, as well as modern weapons (i.e. guns).

I was really into the “swing” of this game throughout the first chapter. Running around, hacking enemies down or dropping them from long range with my bow and arrow. You could also crouch and sneak up on unsuspecting enemies. I found this part of the game to be pretty addictive.

However, once I reached the second chapter, my interest in the game dwindled quickly. I found the gun combat much less invigorating and a lot more tedious, since the best way for me to defeat the gun-toting gang members was to change into my secondary form. The secondary form only lasts a short while and then you have to wait at least twice as long for your spirit energy to refill, so the action became much more broken up and much less fun.

Keeping in mind that this is a budget title, selling for only $30.00, it doesn’t have the high production values of more popular games. Therefore, the graphics engine is not state-of-the-art, as some people seem to require now. Personally, I thought the environments were well done. The lighting and shadowing were believable.

The most dated part of the engine seemed to be the character models. The human-like models are very square and blocky. Some of the enemy models are much better. Despite the fact that the engine is dated, it ran smoothly, which is more important to me anyway.

The most impressive technical feature to me is the music though. There are a wide range of musical rhythms in the game. The clarity of the songs as well as the melodies are top quality and help to elevate the mood of the game itself. The songs tended to provide another layer of atmosphere to your exploration.

On the flip side, the voice acting isn’t nearly as good. Michael and a lot of the cast are pretty boring and monotone. The introduction of the Lord of Light is fairly laughable – just be thankful you can skip cut-scenes. The log book does a good enough job of informing you what you need to do anyway.

Being a budget title, Archangel comes with its share of incompatibility problems. I’ve seen several posts in forums about gamers not even being able to run the game. This is certainly something to keep in mind before purchasing the game, especially since a patch has not been released to solve such problems. My suggestion is to download the demo and make sure it runs on your system before you spend the money.

Overall, Archangel is a decent action game. The first chapter was really addictive, although it trailed off after that. For gamers trying to save money on their purchases though, this game can certainly get the job done for you as long as you’re not expecting a state-of-the-art presentation.

Reviewed by Brian Federici, PC Gameworld.