Child of Eden (PlayStation 3)

Child of Eden is a rhythmic, visually expressive shooter from Q? Entertainment and essentially a spiritual successor to Q? Entertainment’s classic shooter title Rez.

Story

Like Rez, Child of Eden concerns a hero (the player) venturing into a virtual reality, or technological inner-space, in order to combat technological baddies therein. Here, the story concerns a woman called Lumi, who on the notable date of September 11th, 2019, became the first person born in space on the International Space Station. After her death, all her memories and that which defined her was recorded and archived. Two hundred years later, the collected memories, and essence so to speak, are recreated within the confines of Eden–which is the name by which the internet is known in the future. And herein lies all the collected knowledge of human history.

Lumi and Eden, however, are threatened by “viruses” and entities within Eden, and this is where the player comes in–for it is the player’s job to venture into this world to save both Lumi and Eden as a whole.

Gameplay

Again, this is where players familiar with Q? Entertainment’s seminal Rez will find a lot of familiar territory. The game “flies” through rails-style stages targeting and shooting all manner of wildly imaginative and colorful foes. The main difference, however, is that Child of Eden has been built from the ground-up to take advantage of the power in modern systems, and is especially well-tuned for motion control. For instance, on Kinect, players target foes simply by swiping over them with a reticule controlled by their right hand, and launching attacks by thrusting that hand towards the screen. The left hand controls a purple homing laser used to defend against enemy attacks, and raising both hands launches the powerful “Euphoria,” which is a massive screen-filling attack.

The game features five stages, leaderboards, and loads of unlockables such as visual and sound filters to affect and mix up the gameplay. There are also unlockable art and video galleries, and other items to ramp up the replay value for players. Stages also measure Purification rates (percentage of enemies cleared), and star-based ratings for each stage. Each playthrough of a stage is ranked from one to five stars, and collected stars are used to unlock the stages.