Earthlings The Game may be a case of good game bad Kickstarter… It’s hard to tell. It took me three or four tries to successfully read and understand everything. While my initial reaction was to cringe at it, after I thought about it for a bit and I think there’s a good game hidden in the concept. The trouble is it is well hidden in a garbled mess of poor grammar. The whole team behind this game appear to be Spanish and they clearly didn’t get anyone to proofread the Kickstarter, making it really hard to understand.
I like the characters themselves and their animations.
It’s a real shame too, because from what I can tell there is actually a solid game with a cool story there. It’s something along the lines of an alien race of guardian moon people being corrupted when a virus gets into their shared consciousness. Earthlings is a Sci-Fi action-adventure and the main character is a red headed girl with a lightsaber who needs to fight off her corrupted zombie-like brethren. There’s mentions of cool combos and weapons and investigating. I liked the stealth kill mechanic they mention, you can surprise enemies from behind and kill them and then hide the body. It’s a point and click type game which I always find rather awkward for action games especially since I play on a laptop. Despite the fact that I can see some potential here I get the feeling the poor English translation will be the death of Earthlings. It’s especially bad that in the reward tiers they said that you’d get your Steam Key if the game is Greenlit, which makes them sound very unconfident.
Really don’t like the look of the environments in this game.
The translation isn’t the only fault with Earthlings present. While the characters look okay and are animated nicely, the environments make me curl my toes. Looking at the gifs for too long was not a treat for my eyes. I also found the song they gave as a sample really grating. The developers also gave only one short sample song even though a soundtrack is in the rewards. Contrast this to another pixel-art space game Deep Flare. Deep Flare had some great and long sample tracks to demonstrate the soundtrack is worth pledging for. I don’t want to be cruel, but I’m just not seeing the effort on this Kickstarter and therefore it isn’t getting my dollar. What do you think of Earthlings The Game? Am I being to harsh?
Track the progress of the Earthlings The Game Kickstarter in our Campaign Calendar.
[…] developers simply can’t convey their ideas. My favorite example of this is the Kickstarter campaign for Earthlings. This campaign had GIFs and images, but trying to figure out what it was about was like deciphering […]