Review: Child of Eden (PS3)
After decades of deep space exploration, man has finally reached the end of their space journey where they’ve built a peaceful paradise known as Eden. Eden contains all of our human history including a digital version of the first space born child Lumi. However, not all is paradise in Eden as a virus slowly begins to attack it, causing Lumi to loose all her powers. It’s up to you to stop this virus and save both Eden and Lumi from total annihilation.
First thing first. There is no such thing as killing or destroying enemies viruses. Rather then most games where a player must kill off their enemy. Child Of Eden puts a small twist on it. Your purifying. What this means is that your essentially healing all the infected data so that it can reconstruct back into its normal self. Essentially this is the goal of the game. Purify and you save both Eden and Lumi. This is pretty much how the whole story plays out throughout the game.
Like Rez (Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s previous game), Child of Eden follows the exact same music driven and on rails gameplay. You have two options to play this game. One of them is using the standard controller and the other way is with the PS Move. Now playing with the controller is quite simple. You use the left analog stick to aim and push X to target and shoot your enemies. Additionally holding down the X button over an enemy will auto lock up and allow you to select up to 7 more auto locks. This gives you big bonuses towards your end score and star achievement.
PS Move was a bit more enjoyable to use, especially seeing the game is on rail. The controls feel more robust and the fact that aiming is a lot faster is a plus. To auto-lock onto enemies all you have to do is shake the controller over them. Vibration is also a nice feature that was not seen in the Kinect version (for obvious reasons). Let’s not forget about the added buttons on the Move remote that help you do the normal things that you would be able to on a Dualshock controller. Make no mistakes, even though you have an increase in speed accuracy that does not make the game any easier. The difficulty (even on normal) can be quite challenging. It’s not so much that the enemies are hard to hit, but the fact that swarms of them gather up together, making it hard to target them while countering attacks.
The amount of time your going to spend on story is rather short and can be beaten in just a few hours. Luckily though, for those of you who love completing a game to its maxed there are loads of collectibles from each stage. These unlock a variety of things such as artwork, sound, new visuals, and a few game options. It’s probably the only reason to continue playing the game after it’s beaten along with collecting the rest of the trophies.
Sound and visuals is where this game is going to stand out the most. For every action you take a new sound is produced along with a new visual. As mentioned before you not actually killing enemies, but purifying them. The data that becomes reconstructed produces extraordinary sounds and beautiful vibrant colors. At times it can be confusing at what exactly your looking at, but eventually it’s all revealed as you continue to purify. The level design is quite something too. Each level tried to be more different then the last. Whether your purifying under the ocean surface or blasting through a virtual town, Child of Eden supplies a nice assortment of levels.
The number one thing that I didn’t like with this game was the lack of checkpoints. This was just something that really ticked me off. Levels can take some time to complete, which is something that I really enjoyed. However, dying wasn’t. Even though the levels were enjoyable, there was just some points I didn’t want to do again. Halfway marks wouldn’t have been a bad thing to add.
Overall I enjoyed Child of Eden. The visuals and sounds behind Child of Eden are great and left a good impression that not all FPS on rails titles are bad, but I felt that this would have been better suited if it were a digital download only. For what it has to offer isn’t as much as one would hope with a retail game, but what is to be expected from a downloadable game. If your a person who did love Rez, then yes I highly suggest this title to you. Child of Eden is now available for purchase at around $40 on both PS3 and Xbox360 Kinect.
Pros:
- Easy gameplay
- Beautiful colors and visual
- Great Sound
- Tons of unlocks
- Great Move controls and feedback
Cons:
- Story and game time is really short
- Lack of check points
- Should have only been a downloadable game
- Unlocks: Although there are a lot it gets very repetitive at collecting them.