Space Station Silicon Valley

"Don't Plan Your Next Party At THIS Animal House..."

I thought that this game would be appropriate for my 13th review. Any game that has so thoroughly massacred so many hours of my free time deserves this honour, however dubious.

This game was made in Great Britain. Rare alone has proved that some great games can come from England, and this smaller company (the name eludes me) is certainly ambitious. The British influence is very apparent: the unusual use of farm animals and general art style harken to "Wallace and Grommet", and there is a bit of Monty Python in the very dry humour of the lead characters. The jokes about exploding poo and poisonous flatulence also seem more suited to the other side of the Atlantic (I never thought that I'd be a connoisseur of bathroom humour, but God does work in mysterious ways). So the British heritage gives this game a leg up, but can you really send a kid up in a crate like this?

All right. I'm going to try to explain this as simply as possible. In the future, a brilliant team of scientists have created a space station with artificial biomes and even robotic animals which can mutate and adapt to their environments. A completely artificial world! But one day, something happened. Everything just disappeared. For centuries, the mystery remained unsolved. Finally, on the one thousandth anniversary of the disappearance, it suddenly reappeared, heading toward the earth. Vigilante hero-for-hire Dan Danger and his android sidekick Evo were hired to investigate. We then cut to Dan and Evo rocketing through space, and there is some mildly funny clowning as they bicker over Dan's cheesy music, sloppy driving, and so forth. The upshot of all this is that the rocket smashes into the space station and Evo is destroyed by the security system. However, his mobile AI chip has survived, and it enters the body of a robotic dog named Roger, who was deactivated when the ship landed on him. This is where the game proper begins.

Since you control Evo's chip, the animal you currently control is the dog. The dog can run, jump, bite, and frighten sheep. If he bites a sheep too many times, the sheep will deactivate (read: die) and you can then transfer the chip between the two animals, taking over the sheep, which can do things the dog can't (like hovering). Basically, you must combat other animals to take them over and use their special talents to complete objectives to open the teleporter to the next level. You can also try to collect all of the power balls scattered throughout a level and complete a hidden mission for a souvenir. After you win several levels, you can open levels in a different environment (Euro Eden is the one you start out with, and you later go on to Ice Cap, Jungle, and Desert)

Problem solving is key. The little racing mouse can't hope to destroy the quick foxes with its pointy-tail attack, as its weak armor will crumble with a few swipes of the foxes' tails. However, the nearby deactivated springy sheep will crush the helpless foxes from above. But even the greatest problem-solver in the world will still have, well, problems. Here's why.

First of all, these animals are REMARKABLY hard to defeat. The vicious bear will massacre everything, and only a volley of the racing dog's homing missiles will bring it down safely, if slowly. But if that thing catches your scent, no dog, mouse or sheep will be safe. And when you do take over the bear, you'll have a heck of a time defeating a rat. The computer-controlled animals have unfair advantages over you. Another problem is the advantage of numbers. One objective is to kill some half-dozen scorpions. The scorps have a long-range lightning attack that can really hurt almost any animal. You are given this task with the cannon camel (erratic missiles and slow movement) or the vulture (slow, awkward flying and extremely short-range attack). Even if you manage to defeat a scorpion and take it over, you'll still have a heck of a time, because, though the game promises you that “animals never expect attacks from their own kind”, as soon as you zap ONE scorp, the whole mob will converge on the traitor. You try running from half-a-dozen PO'd arachnids with electric tails! And when trying to take down a juggernaut like the Rat King or the Penguin King (really!), it degenerates to making endless passes at them, Vigilante 8 - style, hoping you can outlast them.

So, here are the “bear” facts, of how the game can be a real “dog”, and is not very “bunny”.

GRAPHICS:

This whole graphic style reeks of “would be better, given more time”. Endless, bland, migraine-worthy textures cover walls, ceilings and floors. The animals have very simplistic design. This may have been deliberate, but it ends up looking like polygon conservation. Everything looks obtuse, foggy, and grainy. Some delightful effects show up briefly (the bear frothing at the mouth), but overall this game looks... angry, while trying to be cute and whimsical. It's not a pleasant experience. One nice touch is the cameras mounted in several levels which, when touched, pan through the level, offering a “free tour” (these cameras are even capable of filming themselves). More games could make use of this function.

CONTROL:

Control depends on which animal you currently control, and most of them are the pits. Wheeled animals skid all over the place, large animals lumber around at a frustratingly, and most of the rest plod along, seemingly going uphill all the time. The flying beasts (vulture, parrot and seagull), require you to press A for every flap of the wings, and you'd have to have the reflexes of a woodpecker to stay aloft for long. The walrus is the biggest hunk of crap in the entire game, lumbering along on skis and recoiling from its rockets. Navigating the “cool cod” through the underwater maze (which is an entire level) is enough to evoke homicidal mania. The camera is determined to keep a clear, close view of your animal's butt. While this does accentuate the “hilarity” of the Rat King's poison gas and the Polar Bear Tank's brown, steaming “land mines”, it does little to help you see where you are going.

SOUND:

The sound is a mixed bag. The sound effects are limited to a few animal noises (arf, baah, ha-ha, trumpet and squawk are about it), some cartoony boinks and splats, and some bodily sounds just for the heck of it. The music is bad, but deliberately bad. You see, Dan has taken his corny old 8-tracks and put them on the station's loudspeakers. Some tunes are kind of catchy, but not very. If the music gives you pain, however, just destroy the speakers throughout the area. Nice touch, but hardly a saving grace.

CLOSING COMMENTS:


This game was delayed so many times, one would think that there would be few mistakes. There are MANY. The whole thing seems rushed and sloppily pasted together. The final “boss battle” is an absolute sham, and the ending is even more of a rip-off. If you die in a level, tough. Start the level all over again. No save points at all. If you have to do the cod maze more than once, I fear for your mental health. And get this: it's impossible to complete the game. That's right, one of those souvenirs I mentioned earlier CANNOT BE PICKED UP. Sorry, but you'll never unlock the “bonus” for collecting all the souvenirs (you can beat the final boss without any souvenirs) without a code, but that doesn't matter since it's a rip-off, too (Trust me). Some animals seemed to have been scrapped due to time constraints. The springy frog only appears at the end (non-playable). The hippo, while he has the best attacks in the game, only has one task: weighing down a switch. That's it. A crocodile appeared in some print media but never actually appeared in the game. A juggling bear pops up, but gets blasted. Apparently this is supposed to be funny.

Slogging through endless “witticisms” from Dan, who is little more than a cheerleader for your game (he comes across as some sort of British Homer Simpson), and playing stupid mini-games, like a shooter with no crosshairs (!), I ask, “Why?”. Was this concept failed from the start? Or was this just a bad use of resources? I don't know, but I do know this: Throughout the game, you find the preserved corpses of the scientists. They are still standing (or sitting), with looks of sour disgust on their faces, but they are only good for the key-cards, still resting in their limp hands. This game is sort of like those scientists: you've been waiting a long time to see it, but it's dead, though it looks like it still is alive, and you should simply move on without messing with it. And I'll bet it smells, too.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/07/01, Updated 12/07/01