Finished Child of Eden and I got say I was a little disappointed. It started off good, "hey this is Rez 2" but by the end it's nowhere near Rez's quality. Like in Rez the final stage is goddamn amazing journey through evolution of life on the planet with great music. The final stage in Eden is...a megaman-ish boss fight rehash and then a orb with some junk around it and then a tree and it takes 20 freaking minutes. What a boring sendoff. The stages, despite being only 10 mins or so (except for the final stage), feel much longer because they feel padded out with grindy bosses and repetitive sections (the "shoot the satellite panels for instance goes on and on and on). The pacing and just lack of being awesome really hurts the replayability for me because I'm not really inclined to do that again (I did all the stages at least twice).
And then the music is just not as good. The entire game seems like 2 genki rockets songs used repeatedly with mixes of them, which makes a whole lot of the game and different stages all sound the same. It doesn't have that distinct musical feel that Rez had. Also ...I don't even think the genki rockets songs are that good! You can only here "FLY AWAAAAY" so many times before you want to jump out the window.
And even a lot of the stage design and patterns seem like a Rez rehash (running guy; but now there's two!) or just lazy like the final stage. Some of the tracer patterns were annoying. I hated how bullets flying at you could be outside the screen and you have to actually move your view just to get them into view. When you're busy shooting stuff on the screen sometimes you don't notice the little arrow that HEY YOU'RE ABOUT TO GET HIT BUT YOU CAN'T SEE IT. The game should have had a locked view like most rail shooters. Being able to tilt your view around was unnecessary.
The control was alright. I didn't think either the controller or MOVE was great. The movement speed is a little slow on the controller and on MOVE well, trying to reach things on the outer edges can be difficult or being fast.
The visual design was solid. Some really nice looking sections. The 3d effects in the game are actually pretty great. Since a lot of time you're flying down tunnels and the added depth is pretty cool. Game still looks good without 3d, but it's definitely one of the few 3d > 2d games I've played.
For $20, was fine. I liked parts of it and I'm glad they at least tried to make a Rez 2, but it feels really forced, like no one actually wanted to make a Rez 2 and so in the end it's just kind of ok and not a memorable experience like Rez is.
