Friday Review: Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure

I typically wait until I’ve either beaten a game or played it for a good long time before I decide to review it, but here’s a first impression review of this travesty of a game. I’ve found very few reviews for it online, so this will be one of the first. Trust me, this is one game to avoid if you can. I got it for Christmas and it just hasn’t been doing it for me. I’ve only played it for around 45 minutes, and that was way too long, so bare with me.

I thought it was going to be something like Endless Ocean, in which most of it would be learning about the sea, except that this would be learning how the ocean was in prehistoric times. It’s actually about you, a sea monster, trying to escape from “these waters”, which already isn’t very specific. It goes downhill from there.

The artwork is probably the best thing this game has going for it. The Discovery Channel has always been good at rendering ancient creatures into 3D, and this time it’s no different. Looking at these creatures reminds me of why the ocean is so darned scary.

There is an art gallery in the game, but it’s hardly impressive. I would have thought the developers would have taken this opportunity to really showcase their stuff, but it’s pretty mediocre. I was quite disappointed.

During the opening sequence (before the menu pops up), the animation is smooth and fluid. It looks a lot like the quality you get from their TV specials, but once the game begins, it’s jerky, rigid, and all around very unappealing. Particularly when you switch the camera to view the creature from the front (called “monster cam” for some reason). The movements are just ugly, and I typically don’t like to use that word, but in this game it’s warranted!

Let’s put it this way: I’ve seen fishing games with better animation than this! It’s unfortunate that you can tell the pride and joy of the developers was not put into this game. It was a quick job that was pushed onto shelves as early as possible to promote their movie.

As far as sound effects go, I really can’t think of any at the top of my head. They pretty much skipped over this, but I do recall that the monster takes a deep breath when you bring it to the surface. Other than that, I really can’t think of anything.

Things are pretty quiet music-wise until you start to fight with something. When that happens some big, epic score starts to play. Don’t hold your breath; it’s not Shadow of the Colossus, but it’s not terrible. The music keeps the battles somewhat afloat.

Do we have to go into gameplay? You run around finding fossils, eating stuff, and fighting with other monsters, and none of this I executed very well. Oh, and you find little glowing things that warp you, contain fossils, etc. You also have to get some oxygen every once in a while.

doesn’t sound fun, does it? Here’s where it gets worse. The controls for this game are awful! I’m not kidding; it’s hard to do anything. Here’s a quick rundown of it all.

Firstly, you unlock more than one monster that you can play as, and each monster is supposed to have a crappy special ability that doesn’t do a whole lot other than make each creature sound unique. These monsters look impressive, but they all basically do the same thing.

To nourish these guys, you have to eat little creatures. This is very aggravating for the first portion of the game because the first monster can’t really do anything. It’s very difficult to find anything you can actually eat (trust me, I spent twenty minutes trying to kill those stupid turtles), and most monsters you encounter will kill you very quickly.

Actually doing these tasks is a royal pain. The controls are very jerky and half the time they don’t work the way you want them to. You basically swim up to a creature and wait for the cursor to change into a “bite” mark, which doesn’t look much like a bite to me. Then, you just hit the B button and the creature attacks. Most of the time it misses. If said monster attacks you back (and their attacks are pretty accurate compared to yours), you have to move the control stick to jerk out of the way. No, swimming out of the way doesn’t work, and the camera is so bad in this game that it’s hard to tell where you’re thrashing to and where the monster is. My butt was royally kicked and rather than see that as a challenge to go back, it just killed any motivation I had left for completing the game.

Let’s move on to that crappy camera. It’s okay for just swimming around, and you actually move about much like you do in Endless Ocean. However, one of the buttons makes your creatures do a 180 degree turn, leaving your half wondering exactly what just happened the first time you accidentally use it. The camera isn’t very flattering when it comes to using those special dodging/fighting moves.

Not to mention, there’s also a thing called the “monster cam”, which I thought meant that the camera would shift to the monster’s point of view, thus eliminating several of the games most annoying quirks. Instead, this simply swings the camera around the front of the monster so we can look at it’s jerky head and neck movements and wonder why this game was even made if they really weren’t going to put effort into it.

I should have known something was wrong when the instruction book offered a mere two pages of game explanation, but alas! my logic failed me!

Do I recommend it? No! This review was put together about as hastily as this game was, but I think I covered pretty much every aspect as to why you shouldn't buy this game. Watch the show, but don't play the game.