It's a short (2-3 hours tops) metroidvania platformer. Keep in mind when reading this review that this is a low-budget title, and it is obvious in everything. Controls and gameplay: they are very simplistic and not modern, but overall they are also tight in their simplicity. There is a feeling of awkwardness to them. E.g. the character falls down very fast; you can kill almost all enemies without getting damaged by staying in front of them and mashing the attack button as fast as you can. You can swim, but there are no real water mechanics. And so on. Enemies: there are some varieties of enemies and some are more interesting than others, but overall they all have almost the same AI with very little variety and don't really present a challenge. However bosses are designed as very tanky, and, given what I said about the controls, I didn't find them fun. Level design: whole game is basically one very large screen. There are shortcuts between locations and some variety in settings, e.g. castle, caves, town, forest. Apart from me getting stuck for a short while a couple of times, it's great. Art: what you see on the screenshots is what you get. Nice old school pixel art. Music: there are a few tunes being looped, and there are sound effects for most actions. The music is nice, I enjoyed it, but noticed some bugs with it, like two tunes being played at the same time. Story / characters: there's a basic premise for the hero's actions and a few supporting characters. The writing is simple, but made with a humourful tone. Overall it's a short great old school platformer that you get for free, even thought it's more than worth paying something like 3 or 5 bucks for.
I haven't played this in my childhood, so my review is not tinted by nostalgia. Pros: * Graphics are okay for the time * Pretty cool animations, enemies' gibs * Targeting different body parts causes different effects. Like, you can shoot an enemies' hand and they will drop their gun * Cheesy voice acting and a B-movie plot are pretty fun Main problem with the game for me is the gunplay. Here are some of the issues: * When fighting, enemies often run around erratically making predictive aiming irrelevant, aiming feels like a gamble * The sound of enemies' footsteps is very quiet, I've been jumpscared by enemies coming from a corner more times than when playing horror games * Balance is weird: I've played first 16 levels just taking all encounters head on with no issues, but then they introduced snipers that kill you in 2 hits and are placed in inconvenient locations, so you have to save, die to them to learn their position, then carefully take them out. That is not fun at all Some other cons: * Stealth sections. I have no idea what they are doing in a shooter. The AI is very sensitive and notices you very easily, so you generally need savescumming to pass them. If you don't, an alarm is triggered and enemies just spawn endlessly * Sound design. It felt poorly balanced. Some environmental sounds were too loud, while, as I've said, enemies' footsteps were too quiet and so on The bottom line is: it's an FPS. To be good an FPS absolutely must have good gunplay. This game fails in that regard, its gunplay is either just tedious or not fun at all.
This game was released 20 years ago in 2001. I haven't played it up until now, so I'm reviewing it without nostalgia goggles. Graphics and sound are what can be expected from a game such age. To me they are just fine, so I will focus my review on gameplay. Multiple other reviews compare this with Lost Vikings, and that's a game I actually have played and really enjoyed it during my younger years. The premise of Lost Vikings is simple: it's a 2d platformer where you play as 3 characters who must navigate the levels bypassing traps and enemies using each of the character's abilities in order to reach the end together. My ultimate impression of Project Eden is that it fails to apply what was fun in Lost Vikings, and the gameplay is made even less tolerable by the game being in 3d. * Movement. Each viking had differences to their movement and it was a part of solving the puzzles. Here all characters move in the same manner, and what is worst, moving is not fun at all. Characters take time to accelerate from a snail pace, turning the camera using the mouse is funky with camera requiring some mouse movement before it even starts to turn * Combat. Each viking had a different approach to combat. Eden's combat is same for all the characters. It is some pretty low quality FPS / TPS with unexciting enemies, clunky controls and hardly any punishment for failing. All tedium, zero fun * Puzzles. This is a better part of this game. However because of level design, dated graphics and colorless artstyle I've found myself multiple times not struggling to solve the puzzle, but just locating the set pieces. And the abilities follow the trends with the movement and combat by not being very fun. 3 out of 4 characters' abilities are just being able to press buttons designated for those characters Ultimately it may have been good in 2001, but in 2021 with better alternatives it's more tedious than fun to play.
The game's main strength is the comic book aesthetic and the cel shaded graphics. They look great! The game's main weakness is all of the gameplay which is why I dropped it only after a couple of levels. Main problems are: * Gunplay. Bullets don't go where you aim and enemies feel like bullet sponges. The game tells you at the beginning to shoot enemies in the head to kill them quickly. Well that worked fine on the first two levels, but after that I needed to unload half a clip into an enemy's head to take them down (with half of my bullets going someplace else despite aiming at the head). Weapon switching is incredibly slow and is not usable in fights. While the switch animation plays out, an enemy can take off half of your hp & armor. All in all it is frustrating and winning a fight does not feel rewarding at all. * Save system. I could live with atrocious gunplay if I were able to save scum through the game. But no, every time you die you seem to have to start at the beginning of the level and go through the tedious fights again.
