In the world of video games, clones are a dime a dozen. Sphinx and the cursed mummy is one of them, an unapologetic Zelda clone. From the eye test of say, watching a gameplay video or let's play, one could assume that Sphinx is highly polished and copies the best aspects of that IP. But unfortunately, due to either being rushed, or having to leave a ton on the cutting room floor, the game holds its self back from becoming as good as it could be.

In terms of gameplay, Sphinx mostly nails down Zelda mechanics, you have your overworld, your town, massive dungeons filled with puzzles, ,and exploration that rewards the player with larger ammo pool and health pools. Though its implementation of these elements is questionable.

Your overworld is Heliopolis. The sense of scale is genuinely great, the border wall to Uruk is gigantic and the placement of landmarks is so well done, you'll never get lost, though that is also because Heliopolis is heavily under designed.

You have three areas and they all aren't that much larger than the dungeons in the game. The first segment teases shortcuts with a large target in the north west section, but you'll quickly find out that once said shortcut is open, you'll only have two more to unlock and one of them is required to progress the main plot anyway. While there are just enough hidden nooks to make the overworld feel worth exploring, you won't help but wonder just how much better this hub could have felt if given more time.

Thankfully the devs implemented speed boost pads around Heliopolis, so navigation isn't tedious at all . You'll have to seek out Atun eyes and place them in statues to use them. And seeking them out from pots in the over world feels very rewarding. Knowing which statues to activate adds to this sense of reward, as certain side quests are impossible to complete with out them. So the player must speak to NPCs to gain clues instead of just coasting through.

The density of side quests is poorly spaced out on the overworld. You'll have 8 ankh piece side quests in the first area, while the other two only have 4 and 1 respectively. If the player decides to clear out these quests as soon as they are available, the front loaded first area will give them the wrong impression that the game has more of that content then it actually does.

As for the quality of the side quests, they're genuinely fine to good, but they won't wow you.

Some are races where you have to swim or dash through checkpoints or complete a platforming obstacle course under a certain time, the requirements are never unreasonable, which checkpoints and platforms being spaced out just far enough to not be a cakewalk but not to far to feel frustrating and unlocking boost pads as mentioned before adds to the sense of satisfaction from completing them.

Unfortunately the fast swimming upgrade you get from one of these is never used again for any other side quest or dungeon in the game. Being purely a navigation upgrade for going back and forth from an island temple and a story mandated underwater tunnel. You'll be frequently fast traveling to the former over the course of the main story. And said body of water isn't very large. The latter of course is only used once, when there is great potential here for a few more underwater passages that could compliment the tight fast swimming controls adding even more to the unfinished feeling of the game

Another is a tedious escort mission where you try and herd a farmers missing livestock back to their pens, and the other one involves fetching a certain item from another part of the map. The feeling of tacked on feeling is apparent in these two, the former is incredibly boring as all you'll be doing is moving the left stick back and forth to steer the live stock, and the latter has you hitting a target underwater and the climbing up three towers via a rope.

I debated calling this last activity a side quest, but it's really more of a semi RNG roulette wheel. After finishing the first dungeon, you'll be able to ask two farmers to dig up plots of land for you for money, or if you chose two very specific plots, two gold ankh pieces. You'll have to wait several minutes (around 15) to get what they found. And that's before both farmers very slowly trod their way to the plots, and then very slowly trod their way back. So in reality you'll be spending well over 45 minutes waiting for these two to come back with what you want. There is no way to speed up this process. You must have the game running for them to do this, saving and reloading unfortunately does not work. Even the money farming is pointless as the player can just sell monsters or play minigames to farm for cash (more on these later).

Aside from these aforementioned gold ankh piece quests, sphinx really does not have much else to do within its small overworld. You can bomb and torch obvious cracked walls and ropes, which are not hard to find due to the small, under designed world, for more gold ankhs or money, or you can do one incredibly simple target puzzle in the first section for another ankh piece.

You can complete 80% these side quests after the first dungeon due to the devs aforementioned frontloading, but the payoff of cashing in the gold ankhs will not be available to the player until around 3/4s of the way into the story. This is an incredibly bizarre design choice, since one of the best aspects of Zelda likes are becoming extremely powerful for exploring the overworld and doing side quests. I can only assume this was done so the game would not be to easy, but as said before, becoming more powerful via health upgrades is a staple of these kind of games, so the locking out the benefits for so much of the games length is baffling.

Sphnix only has one town, and much like Heliopolis, it does the bare minimum to be decent but overall unmemorable. There isn't much to do here aside from a museum jewel collection side quest for more ankh pieces (more elaboration on this later) or a monster collection side quest for a medal for completions sake. You'll only want to do the former for obvious reasons, unless you really want that medal I guess. Some major story events do take place here, but aside from that, you'll barely be visiting this place aside from the aforementioned Ankh piece exchange at the museum.

You can also play mini games for more cash, but their design isn't that special. You'll either do some obstacle courses or target practice courses, but the scarabs you get from these are miniscule compared to what you'll get from collecting monsters and selling them (more on this later), making their usefulness redundant. I do appreciate them being there from a world building standpoint though. They contribute to Abydos feeling like a genuine trading hub that Helipolis needs to survive.

While the overworld and town hubs are severely under designed, thankfully the same can't be said for the dungeons.

I genuinely dislike when this is used to describe Zelda likes as it's almost always used in context of throwing staple franchise tropes in the trash and replacing them with tropes the writer prefers from games they like, but thankfully sphinx does not do that. Instead Sphinx does something not even most Zelda games do. Your tutorials take place in their own dungeons. So it actually, and I can not believe I am saying this in a non condescending manner, "shakes up the formula"

Before you even access the overworld, the game has you going through very well designed tutorial dungeons for both of it's playable characters. Both sphinx and the mummy control very tightly, and the game will tell you what to do, but not how to do it. It expects you to understand the prompts on your hud and study the objects in your environment to solve puzzles.

With Sphinx, you'll have to throw rocks to get fruit and burn ropes, simply paying attention along the way to the Npcs who then tell what to do (and again, not how to do it) will clue you in as to what to do next while not bogging you down with condescension. Such as trees in the first area that would obviously have fruit, or exploding enemies in the second section you'll notice enemies that burst into flames when close, so you lead them to the ropes. I was genuinely impressed that not even 20 minutes in, that the devs showed that they respected the intelligence of their players to come to these answers on their own. So many Zelda likes, and modern games in general, fail at this.

With the mummy, the focus is on studying the context sensitive prompts on your obviously inspired by the WindWaker hud, using your camera to search for narrow ledges to sneak across and finding knee high vents to crawl through. All to find some amulets for your aunt. She simply tells you "find them". No mini map icons, no objective arrow, just you and your observational skills and sense of direction are needed.

These two very strong tutorial dungeons set expectations high for some even more stellar dungeons later. But unfortunately while the remaining ones are all solid in their own right, they lack (or are in some cases heavily lacking) a key trope of Zelda likes that gives them an overall boneless feeling.

Most of Sphinxes dungeons take place within the massive border wall between Heliopolis and Uruk. The incredible sense of scale is duplicated on the inside of these places, as you'll see the run off of the ocean some 400 feet down, and no other sections of the wall in either direction. This is a clever way of making sure the player doesn't try and go in directions they shouldn't. By the third dungeon you'll know to go straight for about 200 feet and then get into the dungeons proper.

The non hand holding approach of the tutorials carries over here. In one dungeon centered around acid darts, you'll see chains hanging from the walls every where, but the game never tells you that the chains melt. You have to come to this conclusion yourself. Another has you memorizing letter patterns on the wall and inputting them via wall buttons via process of elimination, avoiding the trap of simply telling you what section to input them in. And another dungeon has you moving color coded statues in combination with electric and fire armadillos to activate switches, expecting you to remember what door opens where, when to place the statues, and when to release the armadillos while never feeling obtuse.

Unfortunately the boneless feeling I mentioned earlier does rear it's ugly head in a painfully obvious way. In Zelda games and most of its clones, Dungeons are designed around a certain item, culminating in a boss fight that is part test of reflexes, part logic puzzle centered around that item. This leads to some great level and boss design and is an iconic staple of these kind of games.

Sphinx does not do this at all for the most part. While you gain some items in the dungeons, like your shield and dart gun, the dungeons are never fully designed around them.

Your shield simply functions as a normal shield. One would think you'd use it ala the Mirror shield in the 3D Zeldas, but no.

Your dart gun is used for puzzle solving, and the first two types do have the dungeons designed around them but never for anything beyond hitting an obvious switch shaped like a target, or acid darts for melting metals. But your other two dart types, ice and bouncing, are only used for one puzzle each in their respective dungeons. You then fall back to your regular darts and moving blocks and jump slamming. None of Sphinx's (or the Mummy's) dungeons have boss fights either, so you'll be going through well designed, but ultimately undercooked labyrinths.

The shield, dart gun and capture beetle are the only other useable items sphinx will acquire, the capture beetles are used to capture monsters, yet only 3 out of 40 of them are used for puzzle solving. The rest are either for completions sake for a bestiary, or gold ankh pieces for a monster list side quest, or to sell them for money. Selling monsters is the best way to acquire cash, making the minigames pointless. Due to the fact you won't have access to the monster list till the 2nd half of the game, the player will spend far more time capturing every new monster they see, bloating the length of the dungeons. You can also upgrade your beetle and dart capacity, but given you barely use the other dart types, and will have completed the monster lists by then, these are completely redundant.

The Mummy's dungeons fair a bit better. The mummy can't die as he is already dead, so you'll be setting your self on fire to burn wooden barriers, zapping yourself to turn on conduits, slicing your self in three to solve multi switch puzzles, and flattening yourself to fit through grates. There's some funny slapstick music that plays during these moments that adds a lot of charm to these sections and makes them feel distinct.

Many of the accident superpowers will have to be used together to solve puzzles. One puzzle has you using electricity to activate nodes. Then grabbing onto moving hooks and avoiding water jets to get to wooden supports to lower them. The game always sets up the formula to these puzzles in the same way each time so you won't be confused each time. There will be a set accident room on the left and right sides of the dungeons. So even if you're stuck, you can easily retrace your steps. The same clever environmental clues in Sphinx's section of the game are all here too. So you never get the impression that developers wanted one characters section to be the easy mode.

I highly recommend getting all of the onyx scarabs and Abydos jewels (You need these for that museum side quest I mentioned several paragraphs ago) while playing as the Mummy. You can never return to these sections as his take place while he is a prisoner in Uruk Castle. This is a pretty great duo of collectibles, as it can punish you by not being able to fully max out Sphinx's health. Encouraging you to search every nook and cranny.

Unfortunately the Mummy's dungeons do also suffer from the same lack of item centric design. You'll be using the accident powers for 95% of the puzzles. And the crawling and sneaking mechanics are only used two more times in the entire game after his tutorial. This flaw is fully hammered in with an invisibility gimmick that takes up the B button, but is only used twice, and with the 2nd last puzzle in the game, where the mummy is turned into smoke to get past a spike trap. This puzzle only takes 20 seconds to solve.

I also must point this out as a warning. The Mummy's second section has a game breaking glitch where saving at the first save statue closes a door permanently. This is only present on the PS2,GC and Xbox versions of the game. The PC and Switch ports fix this issue. This glitch is most common on the GC version. Be careful. It's unfortunate that this was never fixed in reprints of the sixth gen versions.

Sphinx has no true final dungeon, despite the game building one up in the story. You're given the impression that Sphinx will infiltrate Uruk castle and team up with the mummy, but instead you're transported to a narrow canyon with a basic puzzle. The absolute lowlight of the gameplay.

While playing as Sphinx, you will at points in the story fight 4 bosses. The first and last are mediocre, the middle two are poor. You only use one dungeon item here, and you fight them outside of the dungeons. You'll do rather unimaginative tactics such as deflecting light into mirrors, or in a fit of absolute uninspiredness, throwing a rock and pelting one with acid darts. One boss turns you into a frog that can be two shotted but all you do as said frog is free two beetles who fight her for you so I guess that's creative in a sense? The final boss is the only one of the four that has any sort of genuine effort put in, but it's mostly uninspired bullet hell like attacks you can easily avoid.

Bosses should be a highlight of Zelda likes, a true test of your mastery over your bag of items. Sphinx falls so flat on its ass here it's frankly embarrassing.

I haven't mentioned the combat up to this point because it's just sort of there as a means to an end. You have a basic 3 hit combo and jump slash and slam, but the game lacks any lock on, so you'll sometimes having annoying offscreen attacks hit you. Enemy encounters are also usually fought two-three at a time, but your attacks are designed around one enemy, so you will take minor damage 90% of the time.

Sphinx's plot is probably the most "it exists" example of story I have seen in a game in a long while. Characters all fit their roles as expected but no one stands out as memorable or even unlikeable. It feels like a hollow skeleton keeping the player simply moving forward.

Character personalities are more like caricatures most of the time. This can work if the writing is exceptional, and it isn't here. Sphinx never emotes beyond smug face, sometimes mad face, and one instance of shocked face. The mummy is better with conveying emotion as he gets hacked, whacked, set on fire and has numerous other slapstick hijinks happen to him, all with funny woahs, yelps and oofs. Both are silent protagonists which is perfectly fine. But their lack of expression really doesn't do them any favors. It doesn't help that other characters convey emotion just fine. So this oversight is baffling.

The game ends on a blatant cliffhanger, and never addresses what happened to a character that betrays you at the 1/3rd mark of the game. I guess he was killed offscreen? This isn't a case of show don't tell, said character is just gone and never brought up again. There's not even a hint as to what happened to him.

Sphinx is a fantastic looking game from both a technical and artistic standpoint.

I recommend playing the Xbox version of the game. It has the sharpest textures (And is what the PC and switch ports are based on) and runs the smoothest. The ps2 version suffers from blurry smeared textures and the GC version has some pretty frequent slowdown. Character models are highly detailed, with deep metallic grooves on sphinx's headdress, detailed fabric textures on the Mummy's wrappings, little details like rotted fabric also shows up on some shopkeepers, a vagabond in the desert also has detailed threading in his umbrella etc.

The animations are top notch. During conversations characters use exaggerated movements to convey emotion to compensate for the lack of voice acting, and enemy attacks are well telegraphed. So the average combat never feels frustrating.

The art direction is inline with what you would expect an Egyptian mythology themed game to look like. Your staples like Anubis statues, sphinx heads, hieroglyphs and pharaohs are all here. Bosses are heavily stylized versions of monsters from legends and Egyptian mythology buffs will get some good mileage out of it.

There are some deliberate inaccuracies here in order for the devs to try and frame a more unique story, Ankenhaten is Tutankhamen's older brother instead of his father, and Nefferti is his fiancée instead of step mother. But this is a common thing in general for entertainment. Nothing comes off as heavily altered and the devs did their best to maintain most of the characters actions as written in historical records and over all mythology.

The massive and impressive scale of the world helps convey a cool sense of how real ancient Egyptians were masters of engineering. I can totally see someone gaining an interest in the actual history and mythology given the care put into the art direction.

The music of sphinx is the most unmemorable music you will ever hear in a video game, only the catchy jingles that play during the Mummy's accident phases will stick with you for more than five minutes. Nothing here is bad by any means, but it's no where near good either.

Thankfully however, sphinx has no voice acting. Any game is made infinitely better when the player never has to worry about horrid voice over performance or direction. And I give this game major props for not including it when it was becoming expected in 2003.

Sphinx has all the makings of a great game. The dungeons show great talent in level design, the art direction and visuals are absolutely timeless, and the optimization is excellent should you play the Xbox version. But what ultimately holds it back is its refusal to fully embrace Zelda's tropes.

From the surface you may think it does, a gameplay video shows you similar exploration, a seemingly diverse set of item centric dungeons given it's blatant copying of WindWaker's hud etc. But when you actually play it to completion, you get the boneless Zelda experience instead. A good game none the less, but a heavily flawed one at the end of the day.

7/10.