Child of Eden Review (X360)

Child of Eden is less a game and more an experience. Gorgeous visuals and thumping music blend with an unmatched feeling of freedom and immersion as you wave your hands to destroy enemies to the beat of the music. It gives you a sort of goose bump-y, warm fuzzy feeling of "This is something special beyond just a videogame" that few games can match. Child of Eden is simply stunning.Game Details Kinect controls optional Publisher: Ubisoft Developer: Q? Entertainment ESRB Rating: “E10" for Everyone 10+ Genre: Music/Rhythm/Shooter Pros: Stunning visuals and great music; Kinect controls work well Cons: Not a ton of content; Kinect controls are tiring

The story in Child of Eden is set far in the future where the Internet is a source of all human knowledge and now called Eden. The memories of the first child born in space, named Lumi, are also stored on Eden, but they are under attack from a virus. So you have to travel through Eden to purify the virus and recover Lumi's memories.

Each stage in the game has a different theme. The first stage is called "Matrix" and is sort of a high-tech entry into Eden full of geometric shapes and high-tech stuff. The other stages are tied to emotions and are much more organic with titles like "Beauty", "Passsion", and "Hope" among others. The visuals grow increasingly trippy and crazy through each level, and the things you see and interact with get pretty wild.

The game is rather small, unfortunately, offering only a handful of levels that you are expected to play through multiple times in order to unlock everything. There is a lot of stuff to unlock, and the high-score aspect of the game can keep you coming back, so the lack of stages isn't a huge problem, but it can still be hard to justify spending $50 for 90 minutes of real gameplay if you don't buy into the artsy-fartsy stuff.

The game controls fairly simply. You are automatically moved through levels and only have to worry about moving an onscreen cursor around to target enemies. You have two weapons - a lock on missile that can lock onto eight enemies at once, and a machine gun-like weapon used to destroy the occasional enemy or incoming missile that is immune to your lock on weapon. You also have a screen clearing special attack called Euphoria. As you play, you pick up extra health and Euphoria power-ups. The beat of the music plays a big role in the gameplay, and firing your locked-on weapon in time with the music gives you score bonuses.

And that is pretty much it. It isn't a complicated game, but it can be challenging as each level has its own rhythm and flow and will occasionally throw a ton of things at you all at once. Like I said, though, it isn't so much a game as it is an experience, and the gameplay is just a small part of what the game is really about. It is about overloading your senses with great visuals and music, and making your own music as each destroyed enemy makes a musical sound. It is about soaking in the visuals and coming up with your own interpretations about what it all means.

You can control Child of Eden in two ways. Both with a regular Xbox 360 controller as well as using Kinect for hands free gaming. The controller works well and has the benefit of giving you a little rumble along with the beat in each level. It adds "Touch" to the visual and aural sensory overload and helps to immerse you in the game even more.

Kinect

The Kinect controls offer a different feeling experience even though you are playing the same levels and doing the same things as you would with a controller. Your left hand controls your purple "gun" and your right hand controls your lock on "missiles" and you sort of punch forward to launch them. When you want to use one or the other, you just raise that hand toward the screen. To use Euphoria, you raise both hands into the air. There is also an alternate control method where you use one hand to "shoot" and clap your hands to switch between the weapons, but the default scheme worked fine for us.

And the controls definitely do work. You can adjust how fast the cursor moves onscreen, and targeting exactly what you want is really surprisingly intuitive and easy. In fact, some areas that I struggled with on a controller were easier with Kinect simply because I could react faster and more smoothly. Checking the leaderboards shows that both the controller and Kinect are equally capable of earning high scores.

The only bad thing about using Kinect is that it will absolutely wear you out. You only use your arms, so it isn't like your body gets tired, but your arms will be sore after a few levels.

In the end, Child of Eden is a wonderful experience the excels on just about every level. It looks and sounds fantastic. It is fun and satisfying and offers an addictive high-score style of gameplay along with tons of unlockables to really hook you. And it controls fantastically well with both a normal controller as well as using Kinect.

Of course, it has to be said that how much value you get out of it really depends on how much you want to immerse yourself into the experience and how much the artistic aspects of the game appeal to you. As a game, it doesn't have a ton of features and is pretty simple and not really worth full MSRP. As an overall experience, though, and as something that is impressive enough it is worthy of showing off to your friends and family, and as something that is just cool to have on your shelf, Child of Eden is well worth a purchase.

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