Downstream Panic!
Developed by Eko Software
Published by Atari
Released February 2008
For PSP
A whirlwind has gathered up large pockets of fish, and is now depositing them over areas of odd-shaped, puzzle-ready earth. Your goal is to use a fixed number of items to guide the fish-heavy water through the odd-shaped earth so the fish are deposited between two buoys--anywhere outside these buoys means big-fish-eat-little-fish bloody death. If it sounds a lot like Lemmings, that's because it is a lot like Lemmings, only without the gameplay depth and sense of fun.
Your items are things like bombs, instant-growth plants (to create walls), and harpoons (to kill predators sleeping in the levels who wake up if the water touches them). The main sources of difficulty are in organizing the flow of water itself, as water falling and hitting a surface is as likely to go left as it is right (as Dr. Ian Malcolm would be happy to show you), and in rationing your items. Sometimes you may need to let the water gather in one spot, then dole it out slowly to avoid spilling fish or awakening predators. With bottlenecks and chokepoints aplenty, it can be easy to think you have a clear path to the bottom, only to find the water building up faster than it flows away, and end up losing half your fish.
It's hard for me to explain exactly why this game isn't fun. It sounds like fun on paper, which is why I rented it, but something in the execution lends itself more towards tedium. I spent 5 minutes on one level trying slight variations of the same thing, until finally shifting one of the bombs a half-centimeter to the left caused the water to distribute slightly differently and save all the fish. Was I having fun? No. Would somebody else? I can't say.
I might've respected the game more if it had at least used something more interesting in the cinematic intro than the establishment-approved whirlwind to explain the fish falls, like maybe a strato-quake in the Super-Sargasso Sea. Lacking that, Downstream Panic!'s boring, derivative gameplay style succeeded only in making me wish I was in fact playing Lemmings instead.
Downstream Panic! made a poor first impression.
2 comments:
It's weird how sometimes a game just isn't fun, despite the fact it has a couple of things going for it, huh?
True indeed. The same could be said (for me at least) about Half-Life and Half-Life 2, like in my post earlier this week.
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