Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Eve of Extinction

Written by John Scalzo on April 01, 2002

Full Review: This game is whack.

I've been waiting for Eve of Extinction for what feels like a long time. First it was scheduled for fall of last year. Then it was bumped to the holiday season. And bumped one last time for good measure to March. All the while I've been scouring through all the latest screenshots and movies, reveling in the Final Fight style brawling goodness. Now that EOE is finally here it's not quite Final Fight, but it's not too bad at all.

Unlike Final Fight, Eve of Extinction has a ridiculously deep story that just keeps going deeper into weirdness. "Sometime in the future" you take on the role of Josh Calloway, loyal employee of Wisdom Corp. Wisdom is a bioengineering corporation that has recently branched out into weapon making. Called the Legacy, it fuses a rare metal from Atlantis to the human soul to create the ultimate weapon. The Legacy is pure energy that can be focused into the shape of weapons like a sword or an axe and looks an awful lot like a lightsaber. Josh and his girlfriend, Eliel Evergrand, have discovered this horrible truth about Wisdom. Though before they can escape, Wisdom captures them and experiments on Josh and turns Eliel into the ultimate Legacy, codenamed EOE. Josh soon escapes with the EOE in tow and goes to take on the Wisdom Corp.

This is where the story drops you into the game. Like every brawler ever created, Eve of Extinction starts you in a street level. The first level is more or less a tutorial level that tries to teach you the basics of the game. And the basics are plentiful as Josh has quite a few moves at his disposal. He can jump and hang onto ledges. He can climb poles and perform backflips off of them. And with the EOE, he's a mean fighter and makes the fighting that much cooler. The weapon system in Eve of Extinction is all based around the morphing powers of the EOE. In the beginning you're only allowed to use a sword and a staff, but as you defeat bosses throughout the game, the EOE absorbs their weapons. The EOE is truly an interesting weapon as you hack and slash your way through the agents from The Matrix, ahem, I mean the Wisdom agents.

The EOE also has a few other tricks including a combat system that encourages you to switch weapons in mid-swing to string together huge combos. And when powered with Ley Seeds, the EOE can perform Legacy Drive special moves. Basically a very cool looking blast of energy that clears the screen of all the baddies. Legacy Drive moves are performed by pressing R3 and tracing a pattern with the stick. It's not too hard once you get the hang of it, but frustrating at first. If that weren't enough, some weapons can be used to get around the levels easier. For example the staff doubles as a pole vault for higher jumping.

This large variety of moves creates Eve of Extinction's biggest headache Цthe control. The control is not as tight as it could be and will not always be your friend in the heat of battle. The fighting is good, but that control really hurts it. And the unforgiving camera makes fighting more than one enemy at times a little tough. You'll have to make constant use of the R1 button to swing the camera behind you. These little quirks wouldn't be so bad if not for Eve of Extinction's linking of moves. Pole vault with the staff, switch the EOE off, grab the ladder, and start climbing. It's a convoluted mess of controls and only there to make the game seem harder.

For a game so concerned with it's deep backstory, after level 3 the bosses start to just drop out of the sky with no explanation as to who they or why you're fighting. That's the problem, the generic feel of everything. Over the course of the game you'll fight maybe eight different types of enemies and even then they all really look the same. No one but Josh, Eliel, and the first few bosses have any kind of personality. There of course includes the requisite hot female android, a staple of games that take place "in the future." Just once I'd like to see a really butch android, I think that'd be funny. The levels all kinda follow a similar generic pattern too. There's the street level, the office building, the ancient ruins, the runaway plane, it's all been there, done that. Everything looks great, the graphics are detailed, sharp (if maybe a little too sharp), and really suck you into the world Yuke's created.

The sound, whack, is a bit, whack whack, of a mixed bag, whack whack whack. There's, whack, the lightsaber hum, whack whack, when you swing a weapon, whack whack whack. And a lot of whacking noises when you hit something. All very generic, a few ripped off from Star Wars, whack, oww that was my hand. There were also rumors of a guitar driven rock-techno score in there but it kept getting drowned out by all the whacking. I thought I heard it a few times, but that just may have been my imagination. Coming off better is the voice acting, which is very good and there's a lot of it. Eliel actually coaches you through the game, so the voice acting works out well in-game too.

All of these things combine to make a game that is just too short for it's own good. It's also too easy of a game to have any real replay value. The enemies always fight you one at a time. What's so hard about that? Even if they did attack in groups, it's all pattern memorization. Once the patterns are figured out it's real easy. And with unlimited continues and a save anywhere option, the game is even less difficult, take a cue from Maximo, less is more people. The levels are also extremely short, which in turn makes the game really short. And every level follows the same layout: start level, find obstacle, find Ley Seeds for newest weapon, use weapon's Legacy Drive to destroy the obstacle, continue on, fight boss, get new weapon, go back to step one.