Musically, it’s the same techno-electro-pop blend that has characterized Mizuguchi’s other games but the art direction in Eden pulls you in right away. It’s fractal and organic at the same time, and swooping through strands of DNA, electron microscope imagery and flying flowers deliver a torrent of eye candy.
Using Kinect, you can fire blast at enemies with either hand. Your left hand shoots less-powerful tracer beams that work best on nasties of certain colors, and sweeping your right hand lets you tag multiple targets which you then shoot by thrusting your hand at the screen. Doing the sweep-and-shoot thing in rhythm with the music lets you earn higher scores, making the music more than just a backdrop and connecting your movements more closely to the beat to earn rewards. See? Synaesthesia.
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The rail shooter’s one of those genres that may seem to have been best done in the past, with many gamers owning fuzzy memories of classics like Space Harrier and the Panzer Dragoon games. Child of Eden shows how Kinect and motion control can breathe new life into design templates by revising how we interact with games.
Playing COE feels like dancing sometimes, but with tension and danger. You’ll feel like you’re scrawling on and poking a living painting, with bleeps, chords and pings that respond to your movement. It’s telling that you’re not really touching the game, but you’ll feel like you are.
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As idyllic as the experience sounds, there’s real challenge in Child of Eden. Bullets swarm towards you as waves and sections of each level need to be peeled away like puzzles. Where do you shoot the giant phoenix that was a blue sperm whale flying through space just a second ago? (Hint, those red bulbs on its wings are misleading…)
You can play the game with a standard Xbox controller with no problem but it’s definitely better with Kinect. However, the usual caveats about Kinect apply here–difficulty tracking the player, inconsistent accuracy, etc.–so it’s nice to have another option for playing Child of Eden.
Right now, Child of Eden is the trippy, blissed-out savior of motion-control games. Mizuguchi’s latest marks the best example yet of a game living up to the transformative power of Kinect—a perfect marriage of vision and technology that turns something familiar into something fresh. If you own a Kinect that’s been doing nothing else but nodding at you while you boot up other games, consider Child of Eden a must-buy.
Techland Score: 8.7 out of 10