Anachronox is a 3rd person Japanese console-style 3D-RPG laced with turn-based combat. You controls up to 3 characters at a time, from an eventual cast of seven, exploring the galaxy and 3 different dimensions. The main gameplay is exploration of the environment, melée with various galactic bad guys, and discovery of unique weapons and items that aid you on your quest. You can choose different characters to play and different ways to do things, leading you to different events and areas in the game. You really won't get bored, all dialogues are sharp and well written and the cut-scenes are genuinely humorous and sometime pretty kinky - like "Peach Pump: Haha Glutton for punishment, eh? What's your torture tonight?...." :] In addition, each character has different Battle Skills with unique effects, and World Skills they can use to access places and info the other characters can't. For example, Boots can pick locks, Pal-18 can talk to computers, the bearded dwarf Grumpos can bore people into telling him everything he needs to know etc. Anachronox's combat system is a turn-based affair with lots of flashing lights, special effects. If you ever played a Final Fantasy game you will easy recognize what inspired Anachronox :)
Anachronox utilizes the heavily-modified Quake 2 engine (tweaked to its max) that provides 32-bit graphics, particle system, spline-based camera scriptor, APE programming language etc. However this old engine already show its age. The characters look to be blocky and low in the polygon area, fortunately they're very well rendered and the architecture and city are nicely done so the game's graphics can be forgiven. Only the turn-based nature of the combat might not be to everyone's tastes - looks very weird, I could say childish. The voice acting nicely surprised me, it's extremely well done, as well as music (techno classical mix) that suitably reflects the environment. The game contains bad language, but if you have kids, you have chance to turn off any bad language when they install it, well why not, I think some parents will appreciate this option.
Although Anachronox is definitively enjoyable game with an excellent story, acting, animations, cutscenes, you will need a high dose of patience to play it. Anachronox is just beastly slow. It's exhausting to spend hours and hours running from one side of the city to another talking to people, collecting items etc. However I bet there are gamers that will love Anachronox anyway, especially Final Fantasy/RPG/Sci-fi fans. Download playable demo (96.8MB).