PixlBit

If there is any activity that comes close to my passion for gaming, it would be reading. I’m always working through a good book, and my reading list is almost as long as my gaming backlog. While my tastes in books run in all directions, my love for sci-fi and fantasy is strong. Since the day that my father sat me on his lap and read to me the adventures of John Carter, Dejah Thoris, and Tars Tarkas on the red planet of Mars I’ve been hooked. In recent years, I’ve been reading the true legends of the SF genre: Heinlein, Asimov, and of course H.G. Wells. So you can imagine my pleasant surprise when I found out that the new War of the Worlds game was based on the original book and not the movie or radio drama adaptations. That pleasant feeling gave way to despair, however.

The War of the Worlds makes a strong, positive first impression. The game is narrated by none other than Patrick Stewart, and hearing his dulcet tones open the game gave me a warm, comforting feeling, like everything was going to be okay for this review. Developer Other Ocean mainly works on licensed material, and from their catalog, these games look competent if not a bit lifeless. The War of the Worlds, on the other hand, seems to be infused with passion and care, at least from an aesthetic standpoint.

This game looks amazing, plain and simple. The environments are intricately detailed, and the 2D levels feature tons of background and foreground scrolling that adds depth to the setting. There’s a bleak, washed-out hopelessness at play here, and it immediately brings thoughts of Limbo to mind. The dark environments, desaturated color scheme, and use of shadows creates a chilling depiction of a ravaged post-WW II London that I won’t soon forget. The story is told almost entirely through Stewart’s narration, and at times, the game feels like a really excellent audio book. Control is rarely taken away from you, and you’ll want to continue just to hear more of H.G. Wells’ masterwork in this new, digital form. Yes, The War of the Worlds is amazing to look at, listen to, and marvel at.

The problem comes when you have to actually play it.

That’s because from almost the first jump this game seems to fight the player at every turn. It’s almost tragic that a game with nigh-perfect presentation is also nigh-unplayable. What’s even more tragic is the fact that many of the reasons the game is so difficult to play are directly related to the way it looks and moves. This is a perfect example of style getting in the way of gameplay, and while it didn’t break my heart, it nearly broke my controller.

The War of the Worlds is a side-scrolling puzzle game, very much like the original Prince of Persia. In fact, the influences of that game are so strong that the product suffers as a result. Just like PoP, this game uses rotoscoped animation. This means that Arthur Clark moves with gorgeous, fluid animation. It also means that he doesn’t respond all that well to controller inputs, which is a crippling problem for a game of this type. Your character moves slowly, reacts slowly, and generally flounders when you need to make complex movements. But the sad part is that you’ll be asked to make extremely complex movements, because this is one of the hardest games I’ve played in a long time. Not the challenging, tough-but-fair feeling that you get from something like Demon’s Souls, but more like the confusing, punitive, spike-your-controller-on-the-floor feeling. I was constantly yelling “What?!” at my screen, because this game is full of inconsistencies and doesn’t seem to follow the rules it establishes. There were many, many times where my character would just die because, well, who knows why? This is a game that demands perfection from the player but doesn’t give you the tools to do so. A great example is a section where I needed to jump over four or five little fires. I had to do this quickly, because there was a Martian proximity mine between each fire, and they would detonate and kill me if I hesitated too long. The problem is, the hit detection of this game is almost worthless. After dying about 15-20 times on this simple section I finally made it through, doing the exact same thing I had done each and every time before. It felt as if the game decided to let me through randomly, and it wasn’t from any skill of my own. This is trial by death at its worst, and the controls are so sluggish that you’re pretty much guaranteed to fail over and over and over again, even if you know exactly what you need to do.

And that’s a real tragedy, because I think there are things in War of the Worlds that people should experience. I’ve often wondered why more developers don’t leverage books as source material for games more often, and the execution of this story is top notch. The soundtrack ebbs and flows with the action, and Patrick Stewart adds that certain something that takes War of the Worlds from a simple platformer to a piece of gaming art. Running from a giant Martian tripod is frightening and pulse-pounding—at least the first time. Once you die 20 or 30 times and have to listen to Patrick Stewart recite the same flowery prose yet again, the magic is lost. I nearly rage quit on this game many, many times during my review, and at the time of completion, I was one of only 66 people on Xbox Live to have finished it. In the end, I was glad to have seen the entire game, but I also never want to play it again. I would love to watch a YouTube video of someone doing a perfect run so I can experience the beauty of this game again, but that shouldn’t be the way I feel about a good game.

I could probably go on for another couple paragraphs about the aggravating problems with The War of the Worlds, like the way the foreground constantly obscures your vision and often gets you killed, or how the game does a piss-poor job of communicating information to you as a player. Or the awful, awful checkpointing that will have you pulling your hair out after a particularly unfair death. But I’m not going to dwell on that, because I need to let go of my anger.

I wanted to love The War of the Worlds. I really did. There is some value here, and some really interesting things to see and hear. But The War of the Worlds has some serious personal issues, and it doesn’t let people get close enough to love it. I can only recommend this title to two very specific types of people. If you’re a gamer that views games as art and are looking for examples of that, this is one of those games. Just know that the art gets in the way of the game at almost every turn. On the other hand, if you’re one of those masochistic gamers that is hunting for those hard to get achievements, look no further. According to a loading screen in the game, getting the “I am Arthur Clark” achievement (beat the game in one sitting without dying) is something that only 1 in 140,000 people will do. I don’t know why the developers would be proud of something like that, but there you go. For anyone else, just go out and read the book. Maybe you can put Star Trek: The Next Generation on in the background and pretend that Jean-Luc is reading the book to you.