EOE: Eve of Extinction

"EOE= Energetic, Odd Execution"

The first time Japanese developer Yuke's teamed up with Eidos, they brought U.S. gamers a port of Sword of the Berserk for the Sega Dreamcast, a hack and slash action game based on a popular Japanese comic and anime series. The game was solid in nearly every aspect and, despite some occasionally repetitive gameplay, fun to play and challenging. Their second game together, Eve of Extinction, recycles some gameplay elements from Berserk, and borrows a number of features from a few other games, but doesn't quite capture the constant intensity of the DC game. It's a good game that should have been much better, and EOE has the annoying tendency to trip itself up just when you're getting to like it, which is too bad.

The storyline is fresh out of an anime: in the near future, an large company called Wisdom discovers a new process that fuses human souls and a rare metal to create assorted weapons, and they want to use these devices to basically take over the world (Mwah ha ha haaa). Josh Calloway, Wisdom employee, discovers the plan and his girlfriend, Ellie has her soul fused to a light sword fresh out of a Star Wars movie. Poor Josh gets kidnapped as well, and a rather unsuccessful attempt is made to make him a brainwashed weapons master. Josh escapes, and is dead set on finding and freeing Ellie's body for some of that happily ever after doo dah. Unfortunately for Josh-n-Ellie, Wisdom doesn't want them back together kissing in a tree, and sends loads of armed lackeys to try and stop the reunion. What follows are 7 levels of weapons-based combat action, tricky jumping and the occasional boss fight to liven things up a bit.

Yes, the story is full of clichés, and the gameplay happily follows suit like a hungry puppy, but the game appealed to the old-school gamer in me, thanks to the way the levels are structured. Josh starts off with the sword mentioned above, a glowing blue staff, and his fists and feet, and in true retro fashion, he'll acquire 8 more weapons to use against the Wisdom goons. One cool aspect of the game is the ability to switch weapons and do some rather fun combo attacks, but if you don't read the manual, you'll be fumbling about like a blind man on a skateboard with 3 wheels. The game helps you out a bit too much with enemies that sometimes wait for you to beat up on them, but balances that with a crippling camera that makes it impossible to see what's around a corner, leaving you constantly running into enemies. You have to keep manually rotating the camera (R2) to the best angle, and/or press L3 down to go into a first-person view, which pauses any enemies or moving objects onscreen. This has the tendency to break the action up a little to much, but it's a minor annoyance.

More of an annoyance is the targeting feature, which requires pressing and holding the L2 button to keep the lock on your chosen enemy. This works fine when you're facing some of the bosses or single enemies early on in the game, but when you're in an area with 3 or more enemies leaping, sliding and shooting cannonballs at you from far away, the whole targeting thing gets sort of inconvenient. There are ways around this, but you'll have to discover them on your own. Each weapon you find has a special attack called a Legacy Drive, which requires you to trace out a pattern with the R3 button. It's a gimmick that almost doesn't work because of the precise motions necessary to pull off the assorted Drives. Again, read the manual first, and read it carefully if you buy the game. That Yuke's has you using every button on the control pad, yet EOE still feels unrefined is another big no-no. It's almost impossible to suspend your disbelief at the goings on, but you do sort of get used to it after falling to cheap, needless deaths or getting beat down a few times.

Paradoxically, the game has some sharp-looking environments, they're also completely bland and unpopulated, except for your enemies. There's a bit too much polygon clipping going on, if you're the picky type, but I got over this pretty quickly. The only vehicles you'll see happen to belong to Wisdom, and your interaction with them is minimal at best. For weapons that can help take over the world, the fact that you still can't blow up a door or wall instead of ganking around levels looking for keycards and switches is another sticking point, if you pay any attention to the game's plot. The character animations are good, but again, the AI is lacking. The weapons and some of Josh's moves are ''borrowed'' from Soul Calibur, but Yuke's should have borrowed more from a Japanese PSOne game called Blade Arts, by Enix, as well as it's own Soukaigi, An action/RPG they did for Squaresoft. These games had many of the same elements found in EOE, but were a lot more fun to play overall.

The voice acting is pretty good, although I grew to hate Josh's trademark ''Gimme A Break!'' whenever he got hit upside the head in the cutscenes, and the music and sound effects are sort of blah. Nothing jumps out as offensive or annoying though- just like some of the blander environments, they're part of the game. Good players will find the Bonus games hidden in secret areas in the early levels, but I sort of wish that there was a two-player mode added somewhere along the line to extend the game's value. Eve of Extinction ends up being too short in the end, and replaying it more than once for most gamers will probably take a more superhuman effort than even the Wisdom corporation could come up with. Hopefully, the third time will be the charm for any future Yuke's/Eidos get-togethers, and personally, I'm looking forward to whatever they come up with next.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/20/02, Updated 12/20/02