Cell: emergence

I was super excited to review this game, because it was developed by one of the writers for both of the Deus Ex games. Knowing that their was a bit of game developing experience behind this title, i figured that this game would stand out from the crowded XBLIG marketplace. Cell Emergence is basically a "smart" shooter in which you kill off viruses and spreading diseases. Does it in fact deserve to be thought so highly of in a land filled with already great shooters? Lets find out, shall we.

Right off the bat, i was dragged into watching all the opening credits. They would slowly creep onto the screen and i couldn't skip them. After a 3 minute credit/load, i was finally at the games main menu. I choose "New Game" and get shown a comic book like storyboard scene with a well drawn art style and voice over. It appears that a little girl is in need of some help and collapses, suspiciously an emergency team shows up almost instantly and knows the girl, willing to give her help. They then inject her with a vaccine containing the cells in which you play as. You start off being told that you can move around in the victims cavity and fire corrosive colloids that kill the disease in the patients body. Its your mission to destroy the constantly spreading virus in the girls system. If you fail to get rid of the virus clusters in time or if you miss an important target, the virus starts to spread rapidly throughout the body of the patient. Thus making it harder to keep her from dying. You actually don't have to kill every piece of the virus, it seems only a predetermined amount of eradication is required to complete each level.

I found the controls were extremely hard to get used to and poorly mapped (i couldn't move in and out, without having to let go of the fire button making it frustrating). You can move the camera around using the D-pad to get a better view of your targets, but it feels very clunky. Theres a complete lack of explanation of what to do for each level, besides a brief description of controls and the effects of your projectile. The difficulty for each level increases as you progress and becomes more and more frantic and fast paced which gives the game a decent pace. The pixel block (or voxel) based graphics are fantastic to look at, especially when there's so many together that form into elaborate shapes and strands. The 3D backgrounds represent the innards and surrounding cavity of the body and play well into the games atmosphere. The sound ad music in the game is mediocre, but the voice acting is pretty well done, You'll also hear the girl cry and scream while your inside killing off the infections.

With a fresh new atmosphere and whacked out story, i found Cell Emergence to be a decent but flawed new entry into the XBLIG shooter genre. Its major hold-backs were the controls, lack of explaining any clear goals and the atrocious booting of the main menu. For its price of 400 MSP, you could buy 5 fantastic shooter games on XBLIG. But, if your a fan a Medical stuff or human anatomy, you might get a thrill defeating infections inside a "human" body. I would say, try the Trial first and see if it interests you.

Cell: Emergence is an odd game. It's a voxel based shooter which lends itself in to the new territory of game development categories. However, it's biggest issue lies in how it presents itself.

You would automatically think this is a simple shmup. Most of your decades worth of training lead you to this. That is understandable. This however is not one of those games. This lends itself more to Trauma Center than DoDonPachi.

When the instructions give you a statement, you have to follow it. This is mandatory from level 3 on and if you don't understand the instructions, you have to figure it out by yourself. Relying simply on shooting at the virus as it appears will lead you to failure.

You'll find out that understanding the instructions with its cryptic nature is trial and error.

That being said, the game isn't necessarily good. The 3d movement feels odd and even once you are used to this, you'll still make a mistake. The game is unrelenting in its difficulty after the 2nd level. So much so that for anybody just looking to try it, it won't be kind to you.

After dying on the 5th level, I was greeted with a "Hint: Yeah, this is a hard level" message. That I guess is the point of the game. You have to figure out on each level which way you are supposed to attack.

It is pretty with the pixels and the way the game manipulates them, but unfortunately the cutscene art isn't enough to match it. The pixels do take their toll as the game takes forever to boot up. First a long load to start it, then you have to sit through an unstoppable opening credit sequence. Do we really have to sit through a credit for Public Domain?

There are a lot of hangups for the game. However, it's not necessarily a terrible one. If this game works for you, it will reward you kindly. You just have to get over a lot of barriers if it doesn't immediately hit.

Shoot- 'em up arcade style meets micro-level medical heroics in this mathematically unprecedented programming phenomenon. The game is hard at first, but stick with it! It gets harder . . . Seriously, though, the addictive biopuzzle produces adrenaline in the player, one frenetic cellular mutation at a time (sometimes several). Underneath the gritty, urgent gameplay lies a revolution in how future video games will be designed and crunched by CPUs. Every pixel in Cell: Emergence is 'alive', governed by a complex set of mathematical rules and the behavior of the cells around it. There is no facade, and no stack of polygons 'pretending' to be an image. What the viewer sees in Cell is what the computer is procesing --the behavior and evolution of every element on the screen. Fantastic and truly revolutionary. Bravo!