Child of Eden

Child of Eden was clearly designed to be played with the Kinect. Since I don’t have one, I don’t know what I’m doing reviewing this game. When you factor in that I enjoyed, but didn’t necessarily love, Child of Eden‘s spiritual predecessor, Rez, I feel hardly qualified to talk about this game, nonetheless critique it. But here we are. And while I’ve always considered myself the type who backs away from a challenge, this one seems doable.

So it’s the future. Mankind has moved on out into deep space. The first person born in space, Lumi, had her consciousness transferred into the future Internet when she died. Now she’s come under attack by viruses or something and it’s up to you to save her. Even though she’s already dead. Information is important, damnit!

Of course the story doesn’t really matter that much, it’s merely an excuse for you to travel through some genuinely beautiful and trippy visuals. Like Rez, Child of Eden delivers a synesthetic experience that no other form of entertainment can match. It’s like a more beautiful, interactive Pink Floyd lazer light show. As important to the experience as the visuals is the music, which walks the thin line between techno and trance. Each song drives its level and you’ll have to attack with the rhythm of the music to get a high score.

Oh what’s that? You’d like to know how this game plays? Fair enough. It’s a sort of on-rails shooter. You can attack in two ways: a lock on attack and a rapid fire blast. Most enemies are best defeated with lock on, but every once in a while you’ll encounter an armored enemy who must be blasted down. More importantly, you’re rapid fire shots can take down incoming enemy fire. You also have bombs. Moving along…

Actually, I guess that’s enough. Child of Eden is a prettier, Kinect-enabled Rez. It’s five levels long, and each of those will take you about 10 minutes to beat. The game lengthens itself by demanding you repeat levels to unlock the next one, which would be more annoying if the game wasn’t so zen-like to begin with. My biggest complaint was the lack of checkpoints, when you die you’re booted all the way back to the main menu. That really sucked when I died toward the end of the last, and longest, level in the game. I get the feeling that with Kinect, Child of Eden could really be something. Playing it with just a controller, well, it was something.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

I was a little nervous going into The Witcher 2. The first game didn’t seem as fun to me as everyone else seemed to think it was and I never got that far into it. Like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, I just didn’t see what they saw in the game. But I could tell that it wasn’t bad and The Witcher 2 came out right when I graduated from college, so I took a leap of faith. I’m glad I did, because I can say, unequivocally, that this is the best game that is a sequel to a game I didn’t play that much of and is also based on a popular series of books I never read. And that’s something.

Geralt of Rivia, the witcher you heard so much about, begins Assassins of Kings locked in the dungeons. This isn’t uncommon for him, since witchers are humans that mutated themselves to become monster hunters. There is a lot of racial tension in this world, with plenty of humans taking a strong anti-elf and dwarf stance. Since Geralt isn’t quite human, he’s an outsider. But more importantly, he’s been accused to killing the king. The game catches you up a little bit and then Geralt is off on a quest to clear his name, one way or another.

The structure of The Witcher 2 is simple enough, each chapter you have a hub town where you can accept quests and explore. There’s plenty to do in this game, especially if you choose to replay it. At a certain point you’re forced to choose between two paths, and the entire game is different from that point. What I liked about that choice, and many of the choices Geralt makes, is that it wasn’t a clear good or evil decision. In this world, everyone’s a jerk and you can never be sure exactly who you should side with, since they might betray you as soon as they’re done using you. It makes the story a lot more engaging than I expected, especially since I came in with practically no lore knowledge.

This is a game that embraces newcomers, while dropping in enough to give returning fans a kick. When Geralt meets up with characters I assume were in the last game or the books, conversations never get too referential, just enough that even I can understand their relationship. I get that Triss is a love interest and Dandlion is a wannabe loverboy without having to have them explained to me. It’s good writing and that’s something I can appreciate.

Assassins of Kings takes a bit of time to learn to play, which isn’t helped by the game’s general lack of tutorials. The first sequence you’ll play through is somewhat demanding for new players, and the game doesn’t help you out. I found the controls a little floatier than I would have desired and lacking in basic functionality and customizability. I ended up playing most of the game with an Xbox controller, which seemed better in some aspects, such as the inclusion of a “loot all” button, something keyboard controls are missing.

This can be quite a difficult game, if you let it. To do well in battle, you’ll have to carefully plan ahead, setting traps and drinking potions to increase your combat ability. Swordplay is simplified to just heavy and quick attacks, forgoing the styles and timing mechanics from the last game. Leveling is a bit more straightforward too, and I made myself quite a beast, making most battles fairly simple by the end of the game. Then again, I played on normal. Maybe I should have adjusted the difficulty when things got too easy.

But I was never not enjoying The Witcher 2. This a great RPG that does everything you could ask of the genre. It engages you with the story, puts a premium on player choice and gives plenty of motivation to explore and quest. That’s about everything I’m looking for. In fact, I better start a new campaign pretty soon, I want to see more of the alternate path.

Dragon Age II – Legacy

It seems that I was in the minority when I came out in favor of Dragon Age II. The game suffered from a lack of scope, to be sure, but I had fun playing it. The first major DLC for the game was a weapon pack, which probably wasn’t the best strategic move for a game criticized for being a money-grab. Now another weapon pack is coming out, which seems like a really bad idea. But sandwiched between those two item collections came the Legacy DLC, an additional quest that added a bit to the main game’s lore and tried to address the chief complaints leveled against Dragon Age II.

Legacy immediately takes you two a new locale, as if Bioware was trying to apologize for not coming up with enough new settings. Hawke and company track down the dwarven cartel that has been trying to kill them and demand answers. What they get is violent resistance, and a new dungeon to explore; a dungeon that contains some dark secrets and an ancient evil. While it’s an admirable effort to make the game’s locations more diverse, an underground dungeon isn’t that much to look at, making the effort appreciated, but pretty much wasted.

The chief complaint against the combat in Dragon Age II was enemies appearing out of nowhere mid-fight, which as far as I could tell was not an issue in Legacy. The stakes of every battle seemed obvious from the get-go, with all enemies and traps clearly obvious. Legacy introduces a few new enemy types as well, some of whom return from Dragon Age Origins. My only real combat-related complaint is the final boss battle, which relies heavily on your three AI-controlled allies being able to not stand in the fire, a skill that many real life World of Warcraft players still don’t have. As a result, the final battle can either seem unfairly difficult or unusually tedious, depending on the difficulty you’re playing on.

All in all, while it’s not Lair of the Shadow Broker, I think this is a solid piece of DLC for a solid game. It won’t redeem it for anyone who didn’t like Dragon Age II to begin with, but those people probably wouldn’t be shopping for DLC anyway.

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon

In a lot of ways, EDF: Insect Armageddon is better than its surprise hit predecessor. The voice cast is better, the controls are significantly tighter and it finally adds the online multiplayer that the previous game so desperately needed. It seems like everything a fan could ask for. But the problem is the last Earth Defense Force game, 2017, came out at a time when you could get away with a being a laughably poor game, and those years of progress reflect harshly on this new, obvious cash grab.

Identifying what’s wrong with Insect Armageddon is as much about identifying what was right with 2017. That game came out in early 2007, before Halo 3, before Bioshock, before XBLA was a serious place to buy quality games. It gave us a new, ridiculous world, where the earth was being invaded by giant insects that also had space ships and robots. Where everyone spoke the dumbest lines with worse acting. Where entire skyscrapers fells after being shot by a machine gun a little. It was a gamer’s game, and it’s ridiculous level of camp matched its inexplicably fun gameplay to make it a cult classic. But when has making a sequel to a cult classic ever worked out?

Insect Armageddon introduces classes to the series, which can be leveled up given enough experience. This means you can play as a jet pack guy, a shield guy or even a turret guy. It also means you can’t access a lot of the weapons you pick up in the game, despite all the classes basically using the same weapon types. So instead of continually upgrading your arsenal, you’re forced to grind out levels as your class of choice. Each class can level up to level 8, I played as the turret guy for the entire campaign and finished just short of level 4. That’s right, over the course of the entire game, I only leveled up twice. A rarely got to try new weapons and didn’t unlock many of the meaningful upgrades to my class. A game like this, where the core gameplay is so repetitive, needs to reward players with constant progress. Insect Armageddon doesn’t do that fast enough. There aren’t even checkpoints, so if you die on a level, all that XP and any new weapons you picked up are just gone.

Dying wasn’t really a concern of mine on normal difficulty, however, since health pickups were plentiful and enemies not that dangerous. If you do fall in combat, you can be resurrected by one of your two AI buddies. They’re probably the funniest part of the game, since one of them is clearly based on Will Smith, he even says “welcome to earth” every once in a while. The rest of the games humor is a little more forced, as you listen to the lady who gives you orders bicker with the less-than-helpful intel guy. Beyond that there’s a weird homage to Captain Sully, and that’s about it for the speaking roles. There’s not really that much of a story, you start fighting giant ants and end fighting robotic giant ants, with a little variety in between.

You’ll spend most of your time in Insect Armageddon firing into hordes of giant insects. When they die, they instantly evaporate, denying you any joy in the results of your carnage. Every once in a while you’ll have to fight a bigger enemy by shooting it in its giant, glowing weak spot. This takes far too long, as enemies show no sign of weakening until they die. Often, I’d find myself just standing in place shooting my endless supply of rockets into my enemy’s space hole, waiting and waiting for it to finally explode. This is the first game in a long time that actually made my trigger finger sore.

Insect Armageddon makes a lot of improvements over 2017, but as everyone knows, unintentionally bad can be hilarious and fun, intentionally bad is no good for anyone. This game’s forced bad dialogue, decidedly poor gameplay variety and slow character progression made it a chore to play. Insect Armageddon simply is not bad enough or good enough to be a worthwhile experience.