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Unfortunately, this long-awaited sci-fi shooter suffers from sub-par graphics, simply god-awful controls, run of the mill third person shooter gameplay and a dull storyline.

When I first heard about Advent Rising a couple of years back, I was excited. A science fiction game with a story penned by Orson Scott Card of Ender’s Game fame? I am so there! Then, after a lackluster reception at the 2004 E3 show, it was back to development. Any game that spends over two years in development has got to great, right? Time would tell and XBOX owners would get the first chance to know.



As a PS2 and PC gamer, I eagerly watched for the Xbox reception and was dismayed to see the reviews report a dull story, unimaginative graphics, as well as more technical problems than a cable access show. Ever the optimist, however, I decided that Card’s brand of sci-fi isn’t for everyone and that could account for the complaints about the story. As for the controls and the graphics, they were bound to be better on the PC.



I have never been this wrong about something since the time I was sure that Beta was going to be the format to stick with for home video. With ridiculous controls, a camera system that likes to show you exactly the wrong viewpoint at exactly the wrong time, and a story that can make the blurb on the back of a breakfast cereal box seem like art, Advent Rising excels in the disappointment department more expertly than the season finale episode of Seinfeld combined with all three Star Wars prequels. The game is just bad, and this is coming from a guy who was desperately trying to find something good to say.



Unfortunately, unless you consider sub-par graphics, simply god-awful controls, run of the mill third person shooter gameplay and a dull storyline that liberally borrows from everything in the science fiction genre as “good,” there is not anything good to say about Advent Rising, even if you desperately wanted to be a fan of the title.



You play as Gideon Wyeth, a young up and coming space pilot with a penchant for approaching docking ports upside down (cross the boisterous flight tactics of Han Solo in Star Wars with the general cockiness of Tom Cruise in Top Gun and you’ve pretty much got the idea) and a reputation for showing off. This leads to what is perhaps the game’s most frustrating sequence, docking with a space station in the first few minutes of the game. The control scheme for piloting your shuttle is so poorly defined that you can expect to collide with a nearby alien vessel about fifteen times or so before you work out what you’re supposed to be doing.



In the first moments of the game we learn that Gideon has a brother, a fellow pilot named Ethan, and a fiancée. That’s all we really need to know apparently, because the characters don’t develop much more than that over the course of the game. When they do speak they pepper their dialect with more cheesy one-liners than you’re likely to hear in any Schwarzenegger film. It’s almost too embarrassing to sit through for any length of time.



The story reveals that a race of aliens has made “first contact” with humanity (yes, Star Trek fans, they use that term) to warn of the impending arrival of yet another race of aliens. This second race calls themselves “The Seekers” (guess what they do) and they are bent on the destruction of humans everywhere. It seems that humans are a vied as a prophetic myth by most of the alien races, but the Seekers know we exist and want to wipe us out to prevent the advent of Humanity’s control in the universe.



Before you can say “paper thin plot complication,” the Seekers do arrive and start blowing stuff up. Gideon must take up arms against his oppressors.



The game issues a nice array of space-age weaponry, but even that is not so important because before long you learn a slew of special mental powers (ala Psy Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy) which make the combat ridiculously easy. Why does Gideon suddenly get these special powers? Just because!



The combat is challenging up to the point when you start acquiring your new mental prowess; not because of superior AI or expert level design, but due to poor and unresponsive controls that make moving from one place to another a real challenge and weapons that fire at a rate of one round every eon or so. Once you can start using telekinesis and the Force Push (that’s what I call it anyway), you can blow through the combat with no problem at all because the enemy AI is actually very weak and makes the baddies in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun look brilliant by comparison.



All in all, Advent Rising manages to disappoint on almost every level possible, making it hard to believe that the publisher, Majesco, also brought us the critically acclaimed PS2 title Psychonauts. With all the promise that Advent Rising had and the stellar way it failed to deliver, it is one title that can easily be filed in the “avoid at all costs” category.


Review by Michael Triggs.