Previews// Child of Eden

Rather than the game losing my hands as I move out of the Kinect’s direct line of sight, here the camera moves from left to right, adjusting the view so I can see enemies that have floated just past me. It’s absolutely fantastic, and just what I expect from a game on the motion-sensing platform. Amazing that it’s taken five or six months after launch - and Tetsuya Mizuguchi - for Microsoft’s promise to be realised.

In fact, the only thing that feels a bit off is transitioning from your right arm to your left arm and back again - sometimes the jump in aim can mess up your accuracy for a split second before you get to correct it.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a circumstantial issue relating to your movement, rather than a problem with the game - yet it’s nothing that the game doesn’t appear to compensate for in these early stages. Whether that remains to be the case in later levels is another matter entirely though.

So you could choose to use the 360 controller to aim and play the game - with regular shooting down to holding the A button and releasing to fire - but more interestingly, Mizuguchi has brought back the Transvibrator concept into the controllers as well.

During a demonstration, the designer placed a controller into his back pocket and played the game using Kinect, explaining that the rhythm of the music and your actions will be replicated via the controller’s vibrations. The more controllers you have, the better the experience as each one focuses on a particular aspect of the song you’re playing through.

The two stages I played were an intense fusion of colour, luminosity, pounding bass and euphoric music. The first, called ‘Matrix,’ acted as an introductory level for the first couple of moments before extending into a full-blown ten minute epic, taking you on a journey to rebuild the core of the world and create life for its minor organisms. You start from a dark vector-based tunnel and work your way through space to activate the Earth’s core.

‘Evolution’ was the second stage I played, and had more of an aquatic setting to it, with viruses assuming the form of dangerous sea creatures and pitting you against several giant blue whales to complete the stage.

Towards the end of the level, you have to target all of the lock-on points of this great whale’s body, before it ends up flying out of the planet’s atmosphere and transforming into a phoenix. All the while, your final blows will result in images of Lumi appearing before you, symbolising her imminent rescue.

The artistic wizardry and the technical competency of Child of Eden makes it more than worthy of a lot of attention. Mizuguchi’s past creations (Rez in particular) could be seen as niche hits, and that’s a real shame - hopefully with the Kinect reaching out to a wider audience, the peripheral’s impressive sales figures and the current dreck that populates the platform’s current software lineup will make Child of Eden shine even more. If you want a killer app for your Kinect, this could very well be it.