Earth Wars, also known as Earths Dawn (I discovered literally just now as I tried to Google information about the developer) is a 2D side scrolling action game about people beating up aliens. I lost interest in the game so quickly that I now just skip all the cutscenes but from what I can tell aliens came out of the Earth and now you have to retake what was destroyed as part of an elite squad that all decide to use swords instead of guns. You have to battle your way across North America killing big bads and doing other random missions such as saving soldiers or finding items until the problem has been solved.
The first thing you'll notice right off the bat is the art style and game play are extremely reminiscent of games such as Odin Sphere or Muramasa but sort of like the poor mans version of this style. The visuals are sort of "chunky" and nothing animates very well. Couple this with the fact that combat is very busy with explosions and particle effects flying everywhere and what you have is a very visually frustrating title.
But I didn't download this game for free of PSN just to look at it, dangit, I came to play! Unfortunately the game plays like a pile of rotting assholes and is generally frustrating and just flat out not all that fun. It's again, trying to imitate the fast melee type fighting that you find in games like Muramasa but it's clunky and quite often the character doesn't quite do the exact things you want them too. Also there's no "impact" when attacks connect and you have no real feel for exactly how much damage you are doing. Also there's no variation in attacks or combos, you just mash attack on the thing until it explodes into tiny pieces and then dash to the next guy to repeat the process. I'm even at a point now where my weapon has a death effect on it so I just mash until I see the icon and then run away until it the death kicks in and I get to move on.
Speaking of a lack of variation the missions are absolutely abysmal. You get the main story missions which have you fighting through a map to fight a big enemy which are kind of cool but these sections are always book ended by pointless "free missions". The free missions have you running through the same drab environments again and again to do such exciting things like "Kill X of Y", "Find Z of this item" or "reach location with time limit". Once you've done enough free missions to run down a timer you get to do another cool mission but these last about 5 or 6 minutes before it's back to the boring grind again. The game seems to have an embarrassingly small amount of content but just has you do boring shit on the same 4 or 5 maps to pad things out and make you think that you got your moneys worth.
But the worst part is you MUST do these free missions because they get you skills which you have to activate on your, quote from the steam page, "Massive Skill tree". The only thing massive about this skill tree is the size of the interface that you have to scroll through to get to each skill to activate them but the skills you get are all samey drab bullshit. Most of the skills are stat increases or passive bonuses and the "active" skills that you get are all dumb shit like "Guard". That's right folks, I'm 8 hours in and JUST got the skill that lets me block attacks.
Now I'm being very harsh but it's easy to see that Earth Wars had a lot of ambition behind it. Clearly, the developer oneoreight has some good ideas but due to a lack of time/money/talent, whichever, the game just turned out a bit crap. Of course, I'm not one to give up so I'll play it through to the end and if my opinion changes I'll be sure to make another post but I very much doubt it. Even though I got it for £0 off PS+, I feel ripped off. Don't spend £25 on Steam or whatever for it, just go and buy literally ANY game made by Vanillaware instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment