The setting is the most interesting part of the game, a cel-shaded island paradise that wouldn’t have been out of place on the Nintendo 64 or the Dreamcast. The laid-back cartoon physics of the puzzles are certainly reminiscent of Banjo-Kazooie, and the faux-Caribbean structures and music pleasantly recall Samba de Amigo. These qualities aren’t good enough to distract from the fiddly gameplay, which on the first level is repetitive and more than a little tedious.

Since your flying whales can’t actually interact with the environment, you’re dependent on the other characters to do your dirty work. This generally involves picking them up, and then using their unique gadget to drag something, push something, or flip something over. This is fine when you just need to put weight on a floor switch or move a large obstacle. But when multiple puzzles are nailed together in separate rooms, the game becomes a frustrating marriage of fetch quests and unavoidable backtracking. I have to go over the stream to push the little guy onto the switch using the magic animal flute, then I have to come back over the stream and switch to the grappling plunger so I can rotate the lever that moves the ski lift so I can get the second guy over to the second switch. But wait, the second guy isn’t on the lift yet, so I have to switch back to the flute to push him into the seat and then switch back to the grappler… And now I’m ready to download Daytona. There’s intriguing potential for two simultaneous players to cooperate for puzzle solving, but imprecise control and an annoying crosshair reticule don’t make me anxious to try that feature out.

Will kids warm to this game with no licensed characters and no marketing outside of PSN? That’s for parents to decide. Ten years ago this game would have merited a budget release on a disk for $30. Is it worth $14.99 to download the full game? Let your child try the demo first and see if she asks for more.

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Eufloria

A disembodied voice commands you to plant trees and spread seedlings around a white, featureless universe. ‘Go forth and multiply’ is the command, and you’re tasked with establishing a presence on big round asteroids found all throughout space. But you’re not the only plant life form in the world, and so you’re challenged to fill the emptiness and not to surrender to the other plants who are encroaching on your property.

It might not be fair to compare Eufloria to other RTS games. It’s not aimed at the market that plays Warcraft, Starcraft, or any other imitator. Abstraction is the order of the day, in that every mechanical component of an RTS is stripped down to the most basic presentation. Units are ‘seedlings’ that look like dots until you zoom in on them, and even then there’s very little customization to do. Bases are ‘trees’ whose function differs depending on where you build them, and again you can’t otherwise customize the type of base that gets built.

The main strength of Eufloria is also its most glaring weakness, in the way that information about your success or failure is communicated. By centering combat around bases only, it becomes very easy to evaluate how well you’re doing. Units are always associated with a base, and while they can travel from one base to another they don’t actively engage enemies except in the context of attacking or defending an asteroid. So moving your cursor to an asteroid immediately tells you how many of each unit are present and whether you’re winning or losing. While that makes for efficient play, it also robs the game of the nuance that’s unique to the genre. Without the complexity of customization, without the build-up and gathering of varied resources, the whole affair becomes a binary, black-or-white decision making process. That will divert but not hook new players, and will do nothing to retain veteran RTS gamers.

Other RTS experiments on consoles have produced deviations from the standard play format that might some day come together in a transcendent game. Tom Clancy’s Endwar has a method of geographic delineation similar to Eufloria. Robocalypse had a unique icon-based command system that hasn’t been imitated. And Sega’s Stormrise has a imperfect but inspired method of moving units around. Eufloria will be considered another one of those stepping stones in the long run. There’s a demo you can try first before you decide if it’s worth the full $9.99.

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.