Paradise in Pants' Clothing

Video game review of "Project Eden" for Sony Playstation 2 (PS2).
Published on ciao.co.uk, September 2003.

I didn’t always think like this game was brilliant value. To be blunt, the screenshots on the back of the box were only so-so, and I had this game tucked in the drawer for a long while before I started to play it properly.

Even then, the cut scene that plays automatically when you first load the game looked good but the cut scenes within the game were, and are, a bit ropey to say the least. Then there were the controls – playing in third person had me stumbling over bricks in the road and my hardcore, futuristic SWAT team running into each other like a scene from a ‘Carry On’ film. Switching to first-person view for a Red Faction-style experience is better, but even then you need to get used to the PC/mouse-style control. In a nutshell, the crosshair moves across the screen as far as possible before the character you’re controlling actually turns the corner or looks up or down. Cue lots of falling down holes, walking into alien nasties and taking a week to grab a door handle.

However, with persistence I’d say all these difficulties are mastered within a couple of days’ playing.

Then Project Eden really comes into its own. I’ve played a lot of games and I don’t know how Eidos has done it, but it really works. The concept is simple, the plotline infantile, the graphics are no work of art, and on reflection the levels are extraordinarily repetitive. Watching someone else play Project Eden is probably marginally less dull than sitting in a clear glass box suspended above Tower Bridge, but this is one of the longest and most addictive games I’ve played in ages. After completing a level, I couldn’t resist a quick peek round the corner of the next level, which then turned into an hour, and was shortly followed by the entire post-work evening slipping away. Severity of puzzles vary, and when lured into a false sense of security there is still ample opportunity to be caught unawares and swamped by the enemy, resulting in a quick return to the last power-up point you passed (a wall-mounted box with a “UPA” sign that produces what looks like a lightning bolt to recharge your enviro-suit, much like Half-Life).

I guess I should explain what the game’s all about before I witter any further.

You control a team of four UPA (glorified police) officers at some point in the future. Earth now resembles what you see in the film, “The 5th Element” i.e. nobody lives at surface level anymore except tramps and scavengers. The adventure kicks off with your budding team of four investigating some sort of technological disturbance at a meat-packing factory near the populated levels of the city. From there onwards you are embroiled in some sort of sinister plot that means your job is never quite done. When you’ve investigated the disturbance, you find out some technicians are locked-in somewhere else in the building. When you’ve rescued them, you’re investigating the kidnappers a.k.a. “Death’s Head Gang”. You then find out they’re all using a new recreational drug of some sort that turns them into psychopaths…and so on and so forth. The same drug seems to be lying around all over the place, and a quick nibble turns your average Roland Rat, Tiddles the cat, Spot the dog or homing pigeon into a monstrous genetically mutated beastie. Some have bad breath and quite a range with it too so don’t get too close. The drug also has the same effect on humans, so you could be in a room full of people you think are just innocent bystanders at one moment, only to be surrounded and one the receiving end of a good kicking the next. Anyway, eventually the roots of the whole palaver links back to a member of your team, but that’s all I’ll say for fear of ruining everything for you.

Your team of four have various skills that you’ll need to get through the puzzles. Amber is a female ‘Robocop’ and impervious to heat, poisonous gases (handy given how many lifts and other confined spaces the team finds itself in). Minoko can hack into pretty much anything resembling a computer, which you’ll need to open doors and grab information amongst other things. The real fun though is overriding the control systems of wall or ceiling-mounted laser cannons, handy for taking out an attack if you’re overrun with bad guys. It’s like using a shotgun to kill an ant. André is the DIY expert who fixes keypads, door locks, generators and other things, and Carter is the team leader with sole security access to certain rooms or information.

You’ll get help in various ways too – first of all, guns. The most useful weapon by far is the Timeshock. Flick this to the “area” setting and you shoot a projectile through the air in the same way as a mortar. When the projectile hits the ground or a wall, it emits a ‘bubble’ of light in which time slows down. Any bad guys caught in the bubble, which has a circa 20 feet diameter, instantly turn to slow motion, meaning you can literally walk up to them and poke them in the eye. Handy for giving you time to think when you’re caught by surprise. Be careful though, it works just as well on your team members too. The other weapon of note is the Extractor. If your team’s armour is running out and there’s no recharge point in sight, fire this puppy at a bad guy and it saps energy from them. Keep doing this enough and you’ll create an energy cell, which can be used later to replenish either armour or weapons. You’ll also slot the bad guy in the process, though getting them to stand still for long enough might prove difficult – see note on the “Timeshock” above.

In addition to your fancy protective suits, and your weapons, everything seems to run on electricity too in this game, and your other main source of help is from electrically powered James Bond-style gadgets. Not all are available at the start, and you’ll have to collect them throughout the game. You can’t miss them though – you’ll get an e-mail from the boss to say they’re on their way down in a UPA lift, marked on your scanner so you can find it. The first two are the Rover and the Flycam, the former resembling a remote-controlled car with on-board camera and grappling arm, and the latter is literally a flying camera. Both can press buttons to open doors, get into little nooks and crannies where a team member won’t fit, and the Rover can also defend itself with a small laser cannon, though gets stomped on and squished quite easily so don’t rely on it too much. Whilst a bit dull, both are essential to completing the game as there are some points where your team will hit a dead end, which is usually a cue to start looking for a heating vent or hole in the door that one or the other will fit through. Think 3D too – many puzzle solutions mean checking either at your feet, or up a lift shaft or through a skylight.

The best gadget by far is the laser sentry – a long gun with a short temper mounted on a tripod. Set it down and its radar kicks in immediately, so just sit back and watch as it deals out the punishment. The best place to put them is in the middle of a wide, open space, preferably on a crate or boulder so the bad guys can’t get to it too easily. Otherwise leave one in the centre of a crossroads, or at a right angle corner – that way it can defend from attacks from more than one direction at once. It also serves as an early warning system – even when the baddies are too far away to appear on your scanner, you can hear the sentry firing from miles off so you know an ambush has been sprung.

Objective? What objective? When you start, you’re just starting a run-of-the-mill mission and it all kicks off from there. Whilst sounding disorganised, this introduces great variety in the game, as rescue missions follow search-and-destroy, which in turn might follow all four of your team running for their lives to get out of a place before it explodes. Good stuff. Graphics are OK, levels sufficiently varied to hold interest, and animation OK. The artificial intelligence of your team members does leave a little to be desired. Give your team the “follow me” instruction and then accidentally fall into a hole, and it’s likely that what you’ll see before you breathe your last and get zapped back to the last recharge point is the other three landing on top of you in a pile. Morons, the lot of ‘em.

The thing this game does really well is the sheer playability. Look at it logically and it’s repetitive, play it and it’s addictive. The controls, while tricky at first, are soon mastered and you’ll be ordering people around all over the place, flanking the bad guys, and only needing to put your sentry in one place in a room to clear it. You feel like you’re progressing quite quickly, but the game just goes on and on – it’s like the first Space Invaders games in the 1970s where the game looped if you completed it so, as long as you stayed awake, you never stopped. It took me more than a week from when I was saying, “I think I’ve nearly finished it now”, to actually completing it. The game does actually have an end but this characteristic delivers in spades to the game’s value-for-money, and how many adventure/RPG games do that these days? I think this is down to (a) a BIG game anyway, (b) pitching of puzzles at the right level, and (c) the fact that despite potential targets being highlighted when you point your gun at them, it’s still possible to miss details in a room the first time you visit. This is part of the opportunities there are to interact with the environment. In addition to basic button-pushing and lever-pulling, you’ll need to shoot obstacles to remove them, use movable objects to get the Rover somewhere you haven’t even seen yet, and use the right combination of each team members’ skills to proceed.

I know I said the plot is infantile but it’s good enough to keep you intrigued, and there are a number of clues along the way as to what’s really going on, though I must admit that when the ‘twist’ came, it caught me slightly by surprise. During some levels your team will be split up and won’t see each other again until right near the end, changing the game from one of actively seeking the enemy to more escape and evasion.

All in all, this is a top-notch game. If it had stonking graphics too, and a little more variety, I’d be giving it five stars and ringing Eidos to see if I could work with them on the next one, if there is a next one. As it is, there’s even a multiplayer option offering a better-than-basic ‘shoot ‘em up’ experience. Good value for money even if you spend 40 quid, and brilliant value if you get it pre-owned or on price promotion. Go buy it now and kiss goodbye to conversation and your social life for months.