Child of Eden review

It is hard to describe this game. You really need to play it to get what it is about.

Only you don’t actually play this game, it's more like you experience it.

It is strange in way… much like Star Wars is just your basic rescue the princess from the bad guy’s castle story (it even has Black Knight and everything) and Alien is merely a haunted house story- Halloween on a spaceship- Child of Eden is, when you strip everything away, a basic on rails shooter.

But, like Star Wars and Alien, it is done in such a way as to become so much more than the sum of its parts.

It took me a couple of plays of the first level to get this, but when it clicked it was a real ‘wow’ moment and from that moment on I could not get enough of this game.

There are only five levels here, and each is relatively short, but because you need to accumulate stars to open the next level, you need to replay levels again and again.

But know this- you will not mind.

This is because designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi (he of Rez fame) has created something truly spectacular. The graphics are great. Mind numbingly so. Players are treated to a visual feast. Images swirl and… things... fly past. Things that cannot quite be described. And the colours. Oh man, the colours.

So, in summary: it looks divine.

And then there is the sound element of the game, where you will get better scores of you mange to kill the bad guys in time with the music, which will in turn add another layer to the beat.

Oh, and the bad guys are not bad guys as such, there is a story to this game. Something about a computer virus and you are killing of the viruses inside a computer. Never mind that though- as I said at the beginning, this is a game to experience, not just read about. 

So get it and jump right in.