PlayStation 2

EOE: Eve of Extinction

Eve of Extinction is the poster child for games that only need a rental. You could polish this sucker off in a weekend and have no desire to go back to it again. Don't get me wrong, the brawling is good, even with it's flaws. The game is solid, there's just not enough depth to make it anything more than a rental.

The problems lie not with the ideas, but the execution. And there’s little things, like the fact that they elaborate some of the story simply through text, the fact that in an outdoor level I saw a single bird sitting motionless up in the air, perpetually suspended in one spot, or the fact that bullets travel at 2 miles per hour.

Gamers looking for a good action-packed brawler will only find great displeasure with EOE. It hardly adds anything unique or challenging and although the game has its share of fun moments--they’re not enough to keep gamers from becoming bored.

En somme si Eve Of Extinction se veut un titre globalement correct, trop de petits défauts que ce soit au niveau du gameplay ou de la maniabilité viennent apporter une sérieuse ombre au tableau. S'il s'avère amusant, ce soft devient pourtant rapidement lassant avec une action qui ne manque pas de s'essouffler au bout de quelques heures de jeu. Un beat'em up qui devrait rapidement se faire oublier et qui aura bien du mal à s'imposer face à une concurrence solide sur PS2.

I did get into the hidden items, bonus modes and button-pushing cutscenes, but EOE's gameplay and overall look were just too clunky and unpolished for me to recommend it as more than a rental.

With its main story mode clocking in at around five hours, there's little long-term replay value in Eve of Extinction. Once you've beaten the game, you can play around with the unlockable arena battle mode or go through the story mode again with more powerful weapons, but by that point, you'll probably already be bored of beating on the same dozen or so bad guys in the same gray hallways.

This game has some good ideas, but doesn't execute. Combos and Legacy Drives sound good on paper, but are rendered joyless due to EOE's horrible camera. I guess this makes reading the instruction manual more fun than playing the game, and that's not right.

Still, it's a decent beat-em-up, and if you hang in there into the later levels, the story and unique weapon system will grab you. Eve of Extinction is a good brawler disguised as a bad one, and it takes some time to get to the fun underneath.

EOE is not a game that I would really recommend. There are some people out there who might like it, but I feel that it is something to be passed over in exchange for other action-adventure titles. Sorry Eidos, but you missed the boat on this one.

Eve of Extinction does a nice job bringing together different ideas, but the game starts out a bit slow and ends too quickly. The smashing of heads and delivery of pain is fun, but is ultimately undermined by the awful camera and limited gameplay.

It's an action game, I'm sure of it, because there is lots of smacking going, but it's not where the action is. EOE is a decent little action game to pass the time away, but only if you're desperate. If this game appeared on GameCube for instance, where there is a vast emptiness eerily sweeping around each and every dust-collecting system, it might actually entertain people, because new system owners are likely to like something better than nothing. Remember last spring on PlayStation 2? it was eerily quiet then, too. It happens. But on PlayStation 2 now, where there is so much selection, so many great action games, that a milquetoast, sub-par action bomb like this is completely forgettable.