"Innovative, Interesting... And Lasts All Of Fifteen Minutes"

I really wanted to like this; it seemed like something new and original, however, I just couldn't. It's something you can play around with for fifteen minutes and show people what you've done, but after that, you find you've explored everything there is to do in the game. How this can be released on it's own I have no idea, especially when there are people out there who don't have the luck of working for a games development company with much better ideas, and uses for the DS.

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Storyline (N/A)
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There isn't one, the game just provides two modes; one where you just listen to the computer make a tune, and the other where you can choose one from a variety of electroplankton, which will play with sounds in different ways.

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Gameplay (2/10)
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Let's just be honest, letting the DS make a tune is pointless, they don't sound all that impressive and there's nothing for the user to do. So I'm going to focus on the other mode; Performance. You can choose from ten different plankton to play with, each of which have their own ways of playing with sounds. Unfortunately you cannot combine any of the different plankton, which is a shame since there are some that sound like they'd work well together. Regardless when you choose one, then basically you play around with it to produce sound in different ways, and that's all there is too it.

For the most part the way this is done isn't even very interesting, such as one where water is shot at a plant and makes sound when it bounces of the leaves. Your task is to rotate the leaves to make the drop of water bounce from one leaf to another, in order to make a tune. While it's interesting for a few minutes, there's only so much you can do, and you quickly become bored. There's no goal, such as in this case, trying to get a drop to bounce and produce ten notes.

The only one that I found of any major interest was one where you can use the mic on the DS to record a sound and then choose different plankton on the screen to manipulate the sound in different ways. Once again, it's fun for a while, but there is a very limited lifespan with it, since there's only so much you can do. There's not even any ability to save sounds, so even once you've finally found one you like a lot, once you turn the DS off, or go to a different mode, it's gone forever.

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Graphics (4/10)
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While they're nice enough, they're just incredibly bland. They work well enough in combination with the sounds, but the problem is, as with the game, they just don't do a lot.

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Sounds (8/10)
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While there isn't much to do, the sound system works well enough. They distort the sounds well, but unfortunately, they don't tell you what each is going to do, which would have been handy. All in all, there's nothing wrong with the sounds at all, the only problem is that the only songs you can make sound like the midi songs from the gameboy days.

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Lifespan (1/10)
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There really isn't much to do. The game is fine as a fifteen minute tech demo, but as an actual title on sale it fails miserably. After you've explored all the features once, there's nothing else to do, and there's nothing to ever make you want to load up the cartridge again.

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Summary (3/10)
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While innovative and an interesting title, there simply isn't anything to do with it. It works well at displaying some of the potential uses of the new hardware the DS possesses but nothing more. A wider variety of things to play around with or some kind of goal to play towards would make this so much better. But the fact is that this is nothing more than a tech demo and can't be described as anything more.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/18/07