Child of Eden Review

            Awhile ago I was considering buying Playstation Move just so I'd have an excuse to play Stranger's Wrath again since it got patched to add Move support. I couldn't quite justify it for just that game though. Luckily, my cousin got me Child of Eden for my birthday, so with two games waiting for me to try Move out on, I went ahead and pulled the trigger. After resisting some too good to be true offers on Craigslist, I was able to get an Eye, motion controller, and nav controller for $25 bucks on e-bay.

            Child of Eden is a sort-of sequel to Rez, the PS2 on-rails shooter that featured trippy visuals and synesthetic music. Child of Eden is also an on rails shooter. It progresses you through themed levels, and you don't control your motion at all. You can control where you look with a greater degree of freedom than I expected although, except for a few segments, in general you need to keep your focus straight ahead.

            These levels are not your traditional videogame locales. They are more like meta-physical representations of their theme. I don't want to give too much away about what the levels are like, but, for example, one is called “Beauty” and takes place partially in a giant garden and features lots of flowers and butterflies all floating out on a giant ocean. There are five of these levels, and in general they last about 10 minutes. It's an intense 10 minutes though. Although the levels do a good job of representing their theme, there are also lots of enemies that look like microscopic organisms or creatures of some kind.

            It's hard to describe the game's look and feel; there are so many trippy environments, backgrounds, textures, lighting effects, and great use of live action. Live action used to be kind of looked down on in videogames (at least by me), but in the age of HD video, the actress in this game fits right in with the graphics.

            The actress plays Lumi, a girl who died a long time ago who you are trying to sort-of recreate using data stored about her in cyberspace. My interpretation of the game is that each level has you searching through an archive to find out about and free certain aspects of her. It's really breathtaking when she suddenly shows up in a level after many minutes of trippy visuals and wildly fluctuating shapes and colors and sounds. You really feel like you've found her and need to free her.

            I played the game primarily with Move controls. There is a brief and super-effective calibration you must perform, and then the motion controls work brilliantly. Navigating the game's menu with the Move controller is really fun; you never have to use a button, just hover the reticle over what you want for a second and you will jump to where you want to go. The placement of the icons is designed very well, so it's really entertaining and makes you feel like you're in Minority Report or something.

            During gameplay, you control a reticle with the move controller. If you pass over an enemy, you will automatically lock on. You can lock on to up to 8 enemies at once, or you can lock on eight shots at an enemy if it can take more than one hit. Once locked on, you can fire your homing lasers by flicking your wrist. It worked best for me to jerk the controller toward my body and then toward the screen. If you do this in time to the music when you have eight targets locked in, you will get a multiplier bonus. To me, this is really hard to do on purpose. From what I've read, it's essential to scoring high, as you loose your multiplier if you don't continuously hit on the beat. There's usually not a visual representation of the beat on screen, and it also just feels weird to me to not shoot as soon as you are locked on since you need to kill enemies fast so they don't return fire. Still, in certain segments, you can get in a groove and build your multiplier up. For me, these moments were fleeting; I never really got the hang of shooting to the beat. You can also hold the trigger down to fire a rapid-fire laser which you aim with the reticle, which is useful and also necessary against certain enemies. There is also an expendable Euphoria attack you activate by pressing the move button, which shoots out like-a-hundred lasers. This acts like a bomb from a more traditional shooter; it usually kills all on-screen normal enemies, damages bosses, and clears out any bullets that were headed your way. You start levels with 1 Euphoria attack, but can find more ammo as you go.

            If there are bullets coming at you, a wide ring appears around your reticle with grooves in it that show you what direction the bullets are coming from. Bullets are a lot rarer than you might think, but it is essential to shoot them down with the rapid-fire laser as you only have five HP. The ring is really effective at pointing the bullets out to you, and makes for tense battles where you shoot away until you see that ring and then have to quickly swing around to knock down the bullets.

            Once you get past the first few levels, the game starts to really play with the dichotomy between the lock-on laser and the rapid-fire laser. You start to run into more enemies and bosses that require you to use one or the other, or a combination of both. For example, one brilliant boss fight makes you shoot down colored lights. One color is only damaged by homing lasers, the other by rapid-fire lasers. It makes you try to frantically lock-on to all the one color while avoiding useless lock-ons with the other color. There are a few other great uses of this concept, but I'll leave them for you to discover.

            I only tried using a traditional controller once, and instantly thought that it wasn't worth messing with since I had already played the game for several hours with move and was really used to it. Basically, you hold X to make the lock-on laser acquire targets as you move the reticle around with the left-analog stick. You release it to fire. R2 fires the rapid-fire laser, and circle uses your Euphoria attack. I'm sure the controller works fine, I was just already really used to using Move, so I didn't bother with it much.

            I want to call out level 4 as an especially stand-out moment in the game. I don't want to ruin it, so I won't even mention it's theme, but the level really nails that theme. So much cool stuff happens in that level, and it wordlessly conveys a lot of ideas about the concept like few works in any medium manage to do. It's also one of the most fun levels, and it ends in a great boss fight.

            Unfortunately, the game's music is not as great as it could be. Don't get me wrong, it has its moments of brilliance, but I feel that a game that puts as much emphasis on music as this game does needs to have a nearly flawless soundtrack (like Bit.Trip Runner 2 and Retro/Grade), and to me, there's quite a few missteps on the musical front. I know it's a matter of taste, and I've heard others say this is one of the best soundtracks in gaming, but to me only about 60%-70% of the music is really good. Some if it is really similar to music and sounds from the brilliant Lumines (which was made by the same designer), but unfortunately those sounds haven't aged too well to my ears. This game tries to be synesthetic by matching visuals to music, but doesn't succeed quite as much as it should.

            The game is fun, but doesn't have much appeal for me to re-play. To me, it was very experiential; something you experience and enjoy rather than game through over and over like an addictive platformer or shooter. It's more like the WalkingDead games ; you experience it and then there's not much point in continuing on unless you just want to see it again. There are tons of really hard to get score-chasing trophies in this game as well as a hard mode and a super-challenging bonus level, but none of these hold much appeal to me. I'm happy to have seen the game's play ideas and thematic imagery and sound, but I'm not feeling re-playing each level 12 times, which is what you would need to do at the very least to get all the trophies.

             Child of Eden is a beautiful game with some cool gameplay ideas. It's fun to run through it and see each level's theme play out and the gameplay changes and differentiations that go along with it. But once you're done, the multitude of post-game content is not that appealing, as it all involves re-playing the same 5 levels endlessly until you are perfect at it, and would require that you master the wonky art of firing homing lasers to the beat. I have to mark the game down for its music too. If it had a really killer soundtrack, it would be a much better experience. Fortunately the soundtrack isn't bad, and there are a handful of awe-inspiring combinations of sight and sound. But you can tell that the whole game was supposed to echo those moments, and unfortunately the soundtrack fully can't keep up with that idea. Child of Eden is a Mediocre Game, Tier 3.