First Impressions:

Orson Scott Card is a man that has literally written volumes about faith. Whether it is faith in oneself or a higher power, it is a subject that his protagonists invariably end up addressing at least once during their literary adventures. For those of you who don’t know, Card is one of the more prolific science-fiction authors of our time… mainly because of his “Ender’s Game” novels. When it was announced that he had been signed to write the script for Advent Rising, an action game about the last survivors of the human race who gain godlike psychic powers, those of us in the nerdier sector of society were both excited and nervous… mainly because any game that has such powerful writing attached to it is going to have a lot of expectations to live up to.

A few years ago, one of my best friends and I spent an evening talking about the nature of faith and the role it’s played in human history. It was an interesting talk, to say the least, one that lasted over several slices of pizza, three helpings (per person) of ice cream, and God knows how many drink refills. Surprisingly, we actually knew what we were talking about: I’m a history major who’s studied Medieval and Eastern Europe a great deal while Anicka… well, Anicka had a collection of information I can only describe as “encyclopedic”.

The conversation covered pretty much everything from Christianity to Islam to Paganism to Emperor-cults to Central-American religious practices. We discussed crusades, inquisitions, charitable deeds, works of art and architecture, death preparations, schisms within religious orders, and a few other things that escape my memory at the moment. It was, for lack of a better description, an evening that made me feel much smarter than I actually am. It was a good night, more memorable to me because it was the last night I saw Anicka alive. She died in a car accident a few weeks later, you see, and my life has been all the emptier for her absence. As a result, I remember most of her words from that evening with a vivid clarity. She said something towards the end of our little chat that has stuck with me ever since: “Faith is good. It can inspire people to bring out the best of themselves. Blind faith, though, is very bad. It breeds ignorance, contempt, and a dangerous hatred for anything that doesn’t fit within the narrow corridors of that belief.”

Advent Rising’s story deals with both types of faith. On one hand, Gideon Wyatt (one of the three surviving members of humanity after the beginning of the game) must come to have faith in himself as someone who is capable of becoming more than the younger brother of a legendary hero. As the game progresses, he deals with the blind faith of the Seekers, aliens who have been fanatically seeking out and exterminating humans for centuries because of their own twisted and intolerant beliefs. The story is as grand a space opera as anything George Lucas could come up with; it’s even better in some senses because the dialogue doesn’t make your ears bleed. However, good storytelling is only one factor in putting together a successful game, and Advent Rising accomplishes this with mixed results at best.

Graphics:

Advent Rising is one of those games that has a rather unique look to it… think of the animation style used in Batman Beyond (anime-inspired but with an obvious American influence) and render it into three dimensions. The humans who appear are all lanky, slender, and slightly angular, the aliens are either tall and lithe humanoids or reptilian monsters. Environments are large and have lots of distant details filled in (waterfalls, blowing grass, sun flares, flickering stars, etc) that look great, but these constructs (while huge) are pretty empty. As a result, the characters look really good and move in a fairly snazzy way but the environments are just blandly pleasant.

The game’s camera, on the other hand, has a lot of issues. One of the game’s unique features is what’s called the “flick targeting system”… essentially it lets you flick the right thumbstick in a direction and the targeting reticule will lock onto the nearest thing you can interact with (which is usually either a crate/piece of furniture or an enemy). Unfortunately, the right thumbstick also controls the camera in the game. So, as you try to rotate the camera around to change the perspective, your view will get stuck on specific objects and refuse to move away from them easily. Equally as problematic, the framerate slows down during game play and rendered cutscenes. A lot. This is often pretty severe, sometime dipping ten frames per second when there’s a lot of action on screen. Also, during most of the rendered cutscenes, the lip-syncing is way off and is reminiscent of a badly dubbed movie.

Sound/Music:

Aside from the writing, this is the game’s saving feature. Sound in general is really well done throughout the entire game. Majesco managed to get an actual symphony to do the music for the game, so it’s got an outstanding soundtrack that is just a joy to listen to. Sound effects are also very nice to listen to, but what really puts the audio over the top is the voice acting. Gideon in particular is voiced by Will Friedle, AKA Terry McGuiness of Batman Beyond (when I talked to one of Majesco’s PR folks, she said that the Mustard brothers were huge fans of the show and used it for a lot of inspiration). Every single spoken line throughout the game is believable in both its writing and deliverance, making all the major characters much more tangible and enjoyable.

Gameplay:

Buggy camera aside, there are a lot of minor problems with the game play that should have been fixed before the game’s release. A short list of these follows:

• There is a ton of enemy popup (units appearing from nowhere), often making it difficult to find a safe area in an environment.
• It is possible to occasionally find oneself suddenly stuck within a wall or the floor, with the only way to remedy this being restarting the Xbox.
• Sometimes enemies will freeze in midair and are impervious to damage. While this doesn’t seem too bad, it usually means that you cannot clear out a room and thus activate the switch which will send your elevator to the next area/open a door/activate some critical piece of equipment.

There are some fairly ambitious elements to the game play as well. Aside from being able to fire all sorts of interesting guns, Gideon is able to make up for his inability to carry more than two weapons at a time by gradually coming to master six different psychic abilities. Each of these powers levels up over time, based on the amount they are used. While this sounds kind of cool, it also makes the game a little easy since you can spend about twenty minutes repeatedly using a power as soon as you gain access to it and ratchet it up to its maximum level. During Gideon’s latter battles against villainy in general, he is accompanied by companions who do a rather half-hearted job of helping him out during combat but are pretty much invulnerable. As a result, the help seems just like an unnecessary gimmick that could have been much better executed.

Enjoyment:

In spite of all these problems, the game is a lot of fun. To be honest, though, this is only going to appeal to those people who have a great deal of patience and like an epic sci-fi/fantasy story. At times, it’s easy to find yourself lulled into a sense of fun for a while before a glitch of some kind pops up and interrupts the fun. Still, it’s really nifty that there aren’t any load times at all throughout the game and it’s also a really impressive story to find yourself immersed in.

Multiplayer:

You’ve probably all seen some amount of publicity surround the contest to win a million bucks via Xbox Live. From what I understand, this is done via downloadable content from Live, and that’s about the extent of the game’s Live features. Considering the title’s a shooter, it would’ve made a fair amount of sense to include something akin to an online deathmatch. Alas, this isn’t the case, so I guess this is a long way of saying that there really isn’t a multiplayer feature to the game.

Overall Impression:

Advent Rising has provided me with the hardest review I’ve ever had to write, mainly because of how many things I both loved and hated in it. On the one hand, the game is a lot of fun to play and really engrossing, while on the other it’s buggier than a cheap motel. I’m willing to partially forgive the game’s problems because it had a very small development team and a limited development calendar… as well as the fact that a lot of the graphical issues seem to stem from being too much for the Xbox’s hardware to handle (hopefully this will be fixed in the PC version, since a lot of computers have more powerful processors and such). As I’ve stated before, I fell in love with the game’s story from the moment I began playing. I have rarely encountered such a deep plot in anything outside of a multi-book series, let alone a video game. If you’re willing to overlook Advent Rising’s various problems I guarantee that the taking part in a story about loss on devastating large and intimate scales, faith, blind hatred, and redemption on a truly cosmic scale will be well worth it.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

The marketing effect of the game towards women is a bit wishy-washy, mainly because there aren’t a lot of moments that let the two different female characters really play a significant role in the story. When they tag along during missions they’re capable enough, but that happens pretty rarely. Finally, while the outfits aren’t scandalous, they’re not exactly furthering the cause of feminism either. Something about form-fitting clothing, no matter how much skin it actually covers, doesn’t really seem all that appropriate when it’s being worn as the work outfit of a scientist.

Web sites of interest:

www.adventtrilogy.com

Donald Mustard Interview from E3