Plankton!
(This
review contains spoilers!)
Brace yourselves, folks. This is a
weird one.
I’m lucky enough to live in a library
system that gets most of the latest games released. While more often than not
they order the big-name stuff, every once in a while they find a title that
I’ve never heard of. This is one of those times.
Birthdays
the Beginning is perhaps the most clumsily named game I’ve played in recent
years. Despite this, it’s actually pretty decent and fun game for kids, but one
that I can’t recommend for more than a rental for a multitude of reasons.
It’s actually kind of hard to describe
what you do in Birthdays, but I’ll
try my best. Think of it as sort of a hybrid of The Sims and Viva Piñata.
You are given a cubical world that is yours to shape and build upon, as you
create life from a hunk of rock. There’s not much in sense of a story besides a
paper-thin way to tie the various missions together, but honestly this game
doesn’t really need one.
You are immediately thrust into a
lengthy tutorial, guided by a glowing blue orb by the name of Navi.
…I know what you’re all thinking, so
I’m just going to assume that that’s a huge coincidence and move on with the
review.
The visuals are pretty nice, but nothing
super impressive. All the various plants and animals are easily identifiable,
but with a fun spin that makes them look like plastic toys. Birthdays might be home to the cutest T.
rex in video games right now.
You actually don’t have much input in
building your world as far as I can see. You can create giant mountains and
various bodies of water, but that’s mostly it. Grass, plants and animals all
appear by themselves when you take a backseat and allow time to fast-forward.
Watching your world grow accompanied by some serene music is actually pretty
relaxing, but I actually really wish there was more I could do. I wanted to be
able to act like a real god of the world, like spawning and destroying species
or choosing terrain types like snow or desert instead of having the game
randomly pick them for me. While this game is really cathartic, I can’t exactly
call it fun.
This game also has two big issues that
really make it hard to continue after the first hour or so. The biggest issue
with the game comes with the stuff you get in the early stages. While the box
art advertises dinosaurs, you start off the game by collecting various types of
plankton and invertebrates, most of which are so small they don’t even appear
in the game world. You need to evolve stuff by either completing certain
objectives or using items to get to the big fun stuff. I can’t tell you how
disappointing it is when the game announces that I’ve created a new animal,
only to find it’s yet another invisible
jellyfish with an unpronounceable name. Most similar games like this (again
going back to Viva Piñata) start you
off with small but recognizable animals, like rabbits, frogs and birds. Having
plankton unknown to anyone outside of a real-life biologist be the game’s first
impression leaves a pretty bad taste in your mouth.
The other big problem with the game is
that, thanks to gaming being apparently dedicated to making everything as
realistic as possible until it stops being fun these days, Birthdays employs an extinction mechanic. At any point while
playing a creature in your world may go extinct, and as far as I can tell
there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You need to pay rapt attention to the
ever-scrolling list that dictates the current state of everything in your
world, lest a necessary creature accidentally kicks the bucket.
But to be fair, Birthdays does explain a way to bring back stuff that’s gone
extinct: reset and load an old save file!
There’s no autosaving in this game
either, by the way. You need to manually save the game every five minutes just
in case a crucial species accidentally finds itself on the chopping block.
So I reached the point in the main
campaign where I guess a creature necessary to progressing went extinct and
because I didn’t save beforehand I was kind of stuck. So I went over to free
play mode to see if it was any better. Trust me, if you ever want to play this
game I’d just jump right to free play once you’ve finished the initial
tutorial. It still has the same problems as the campaign mode, but you have
access to way more items that can help you speed up the process.
The last thing I should probably touch
on is the price. Right now Birthdays costs
$43.99 on Steam, which is just ludicrous for a game where you spend most of
your time sitting and watching your world spin around.
I’ll give Birthdays this: I like the concept. Building a world from the very
start sounds like it could be a lot of fun. The big problem comes with how
little interactivity and control you have over the world. The most you can do
is raise and lower the terrain to change the temperature. Everything else is
done for you, making it really hard to get invested in. I think if this was an
iPad game you checked up on once every few hours instead of a PS4 game where
you need to set aside time to play it would’ve been more successful. It also
doesn’t help that the early-game plankton overload and the complete frustration
that is the extinction mechanic really kicks the game in the balls and removes
a lot of potential fun to be had. Plus, the price is completely insane
considering the content this game packs. If you’ve got a young kid around that’s
into prehistoric life, there are worse choices. The thing is that there’s also
better choices at a much more reasonable cost.
FINAL SCORE
5/10
Average
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