Achron

Overview

Achron is the first game from Hazardous Software and the first game to use the Resequence engine. The engine allows players to view and alter previous actions in order to change the present.

Story

Using the research found on the ruins of an ancient alien civilization, humans are able to further colonize other planets at a nearly unlimited rate. Decades later aliens return to the system and begin destroying human colonies. The first human forces are decimated by the seemingly weaker alien force. After learning the aliens are capable of time travel, the humans are able to build their own time machines.

The game follows Captain Holloway and A.I. Tyr as they use the newly built time machine to fight back and learn more about the aliens.

Gameplay

Achron contains all the normal elements of a real-time strategy game such as resource gathering, unit building, and tech trees. The major difference is the ability to manipulate time at will. During matches there is a timeline shown at the bottom of the screen showing basic information such as damage taken and dealt, amount of resources, and units created. Clicking anywhere on this timeline allows the player to view that point in the game. If the player has enough chronoenergy, they can issue new orders to the past units. Units who are given new orders in the past will still attempt to follow orders they received from the player the first time through. Conflicting orders must be manually cleared to avoid unwanted behavior.

Any change made in the past does not instantly change the present. Changes are picked up by time waves and propagated through the timeline as the wave moves forward. For example, if you go back five seconds and order a unit to move and then return to the present, the unit will still be in its original position until a time wave passes over the two. This can take about thirty seconds depending on how far away the next time wave is.

Units can travel through space and time by building teleporters and chronoporters respectively. A unit send back in time can fight alongside its past self until the past unit it too goes back in time to complete they cycle. A unit sent forward in time can only fight with itself until a time wave from before the units traveled reaches the newly created future because of the fact that there would have been no units to meet up with as they had already traveled to the future.

Units can be manually or automatically organized into hierarchies to allow easy use of units that were added in the past. A unit will follow order given to its leader in the hierarchy. This keeps the player from having to reissuing commands to new units.

Species

There are three species in Achron, each with its own unique style of gameplay:

• Vecgir: Rugged masters of teleportation
• Grekim: Mobile masters of time travel
• Humans: Specialized masters of offense

PC System Requirements

Minimum:

• OS:Windows
• Processor:Dual
• Memory:1 GB RAM
• Graphics:ATI or Nvidia card still supported by manufacturer. Intel GMA chipsets that support OpenGL 2.1 work if drivers are recent.
• DirectX®:dx50
• Hard Drive:1 GB HD space

Recommended:

• Graphics:ATI or Nvidia card still supported by manufacturer.
• DirectX®:dx50
• Hard Drive:2 GB HD space