Elebits

So I got me some Elebits last week. General impression: Good fun!

The principle is very straight forward: the world runs on Elebits, these little adorable puffball creatures. Something's gone a bit off and the Elebits are behaving bizzarely, leaving everything without power. Your dad, currently away from the house, is an Elebits researcher. You decide to take matters into your own hands, grab his capture gun and start to hunt down the critters in your home.

The game works like an FPS of sorts. You shoot your capture ray at the Elebits, they get sucked in and you get power. The capture ray can also manipulate objects much in the same way that the grav gun did in Half Life 2. Elebits are shy retiring things and can be found hiding under or in objects, requiring you to basically make a mess of your environment to flush them out.

The electrical power you collect by capturing the Elebits goes towards various bits of electronics that come to life once you pass their power requirement thresholds. Proceeding to then turn these electronics on causes them to spew a different breed of Elebits that when captured upgrade your gun. An upgraded gun lets you manipulate heavier objects.

The core fun here is a balance of making a mess to flush the little buggers out, and sharpshooting them: so basically two things the Wii is bloody brilliant at.

Shame then that the package isn't left at that. In an effort to introduce more "game" to the proceedings, Konami have slapped in some unwelcome features. Well, at least unwelcome in my book. Some of the later levels come with additional rules applied to them. Two of the least fun are "don't make sounds louder than X decibels" and "don't break more than X shatterable objects".

Both of these run counter to the core fun of the game, preventing you from shredding the environments for fear of breaking the rules. Both are also very fuzzy: you're never certain what volume of noise any given action will generate, and in the chaos of objects flying about you could accidentally domino something over out of view. Both are just plain fun dampeners and very poor design decision to my way of thinking.

Luckily they're not pervasive, and once you've passed them it's back to the good stuff!

Visually the game is charming enough. Aurally everything is copacetic as well.

Honestly, if Katamari Damacy hadn't come along and pretty much defined true, unbridled mechanical and aesthetic zaniness, this would be golden. As it is, knowledge of better out there leaves you feeling that there's a sort of restraint while playing the game that can only be the result of not enough time spent polishing it. Somehow the whole thing just fails to make the jump from fun to sublime in the same way that Katamari Damacy or Rez did.

You feel this restraint in the objects that don't fit the collision system (looks like it only does convex hulls, but there are objects with large cavities in their silhouettes), in the music that fails to crescendo (sounds like they were composed without having played the game, so they loop indefinitely rather than aim for the time limits), in the story presentation that seems to lack soul (the same sort of non committal feeling that you get from bad Disney movies that are written by committee), and in the graphics that vary in detail from object to object (looks like there may have been a shift in target midway through). This is all a shame, because I like the concept so much, and when it works it works so well that I'm convinced it could have been an all time great if it were given the loving attention it needed to grow up.

Ah well. I was still thoroughly entertained by the whole thing, so I'm happy enough with it. Perhaps Konami will have the will to finish what they started in a sequel. Until then, most certainly rent this, and if you're a fan of the weird and wacky, you absolutely must consider treating yourself to a purchase.