GameCyte recently moved to a star-based scoring system for game reviews, in which we described a three-star game as the average entry. In my own words, I promised that extreme scores would be "more difficult to obtain as they veer farther to either end of the spectrum," and I meant that -- which is why the five-star rating is heaped with glowing praise, and the one-star rating is cruel and harsh. I defined the low end of the scale in the hopes that we wouldn't have to use it. I take no pleasure in slamming somebody else's hard work, condemning a game that several people probably spent many hours to produce. I promised myself that in order to deliver a really low score, the game in question would have to be full of glaring, undeniable flaws -- problems that any developer could have fixed or avoided with even an ounce of effort. Surely, I believed, nobody would be that lazy or that apathetic about their product. Then, I received a copy of Exodus From the Earth, an action-adventure FPS from Strategy First. I would like to thank the publisher for reminding me why we have these low scores.
Exodus From the Earth, developed by Parallax Arts Studio, describes itself as a "Cyber-punk FPS" that takes place in the not-too-distant future. The player is put in control of a gruff fellow named Frank, a nondescript cynical action hero with a habit of killing people, complaining about his orders, and collecting large weapons. Frank is tasked with investigating whether human life will be viable on other planets, since the Earth is roughly 20 years from an inconvenient collision with the Sun. Logic dictates, of course, that in order to get to the bottom of this mystery, Frank is going to have to shoot a lot of people in the face.
In truth, I didn't really follow much of the story behind Exodus From the Earth. Not because the player has no story-affecting decisions, or that it doesn't drive your early objectives (although both of those are true), but because the story is extremely difficult to follow, and impossible to take seriously. You'd think a global apocalypse might be worth worrying about, but thanks to a complete hack-job of a localization process, the would-be drama is instead presented as comedy gold.
If Exodus From the Earth has anything going for it, it is the utter hilarity of its mangled translation. Parallax Arts is a company whose development team operates out of Russia, and this is made obvious by the barely comprehensible dialogue and story text that pervades the game. It may seem unfair to criticize foreign developers for their inability to compose proper English, and perhaps that's true; it's entirely possible that in its native Russian, the narrative and dialogue of Exodus are gripping and intense. However, I did not go to Russia to get this game: It is the intention of Strategy First to publish this title right here in America, and they would like it to be played by American gamers. Pro tip -- when bringing a game to an international market, you will need to put the game through a thorough and professional localization process. Exodus, by comparison, appears to have been localized, for free, by a group of first-week ESL students.
As such, Exodus From the Earth is filled with near misses and bizarre phrases, appearing everywhere from between-level story recaps to in-game documents. Similar to Deus Ex or Bioshock, Frank is constantly finding discarded messages from the game's inhabitants, which he can read to clue himself in on plot points or puzzle solutions. This assumes Frank can decipher them, of course, since nobody in the near future seems to have heard of paragraphs, and everybody uses nonsensical phrases such as "They must really have what to protect so thoroughly. That means that I've got what to search for." Sure, you can usually grasp the intended meaning, but I don't think that puzzling over the language is what Strategy First meant by "an intriguing and unpredictable storyline."
Then, there's the dialogue -- oh, dear lord, the dialogue. If you have now visualized the general quality of the English being employed in the game's written text, try to now imagine it being spoken aloud. Exodus From the Earth, somehow, has managed to find a cast of voice actors who obviously do not speak English, yet are competent enough to recite and pronounce words reasonably if they are presented with a script. The results are truly spectacular: Baffling and mangled dialogue, delivered without noticeable accents, with strange enthusiasm and complete seriousness. The actors clearly have absolutely no idea what they are saying -- they place emphases on the wrong words, pause at strange intervals, and recite lines that no native speaker of English could manage to get through without turning to the director and asking, "Seriously?"
I can't remember the last time I laughed this hard at a game. If Exodus From the Earth were a comedy, I would be praising it for its sheer brilliance, but as an "intriguing" and gritty action title, it's just sad. I chuckled when a galactic technician advised me that "It's rumored that the colonists on other planets do not live long. Anyway, I will not definitely fly there!" I smirked in disbelief when a guard complained that "Seldin. Will have our. Heads! For breakfast." I had to wipe tears from my eyes when a working stiff outlined his vacation plans for me: "Our division has got the quarterly bonus. I want Borneo! Sand, ocean, and palms. What monkeys are there! One of them has stolen my photo camera. Son of a bitch!!"
Still, though the localization may be a masterpiece of incompetence, one can easily overlook a game's aesthetics if the gameplay picks up the slack. Exodus From the Earth is out of luck on this count as well, I'm afraid: The game plays like an extremely dated and effortless FPS, slapping a fresh coat of (admittedly) decent graphics on top of unimaginative mechanics, dismal AI, and lousy level design.
If you've played any FPS since 1997, you've played Exodus From the Earth, which makes use of every trope and cliche in the book, while seemingly avoiding any actual improvements the genre has seen in the last ten years. There are some staples we've come to expect from the adventure-FPS, of course, including "start with the tiny weapon and work your way up the ladder," but Exodus' primary objectives and puzzles are Doom-style fetch quests, which haven't seemed inventive since... well, since Doom. It might be an "access key," or a "security activation switch," or any of a dozen macguffins, but you're going to spend most all of your time in Exodus proceeding until you find a locked door, turning around until you find a single-click-activated button or item which unlocks it, and then repeating this process while mowing down everyone in your path.
I do mean everyone, mind you; the game tries its hand at the "stealth game" routine on a few occasions, with little or no actual tactics or subtlety involved. A few areas are populated by non-combatant NPCs, who will raise the alarm if they spot you, spawning waves of gun-toting miscreants to mow you down. Needless to say, you'll want to avoid being spotted -- for a while, anyway, since these poor scrubs are always clustered around your next objective, necessitating their inevitable slaughter to avoid an alarm. Of course, trying to actually sneak around these fellows is a fool's errand, since they all seem to have 360° vision: No matter which way they are facing, moving into their potential line of sight counts as being spotted. In essence, any attempts at stealth will fly swiftly out the window, replaced by a manic dash to try and gun the technicians down before they can reach the alarm -- a task they will commit to wholeheartedly, dashing as fast as they can towards the nearest button without thoughts of cover or safety, even if this brings them directly towards the intruder who clearly intends to blast them with a shotgun from point-blank range.
The AI doesn't improve much when your foes are armed, either. The game's enemies appear to have received one of two possible orders, which they follow unquestioningly: Half of them have been instructed, "If you see an intruder, go over to where he is, and shoot at him," while the other half have been told, "This is your spot. You can shoot from here, but under no circumstances should you move."
Enemies of the former variety might not have the sense to take cover or flank you, but at least they're moderately interesting to fight. The stationary enemies, following the "stay put" order, are utterly ridiculous in their incompetence, shooting at you unceasingly even after you have left their line of sight. On several occasions, I encountered a group of enemies by surprise -- opening a door to find a pair of rifle-wielding guards lining a corridor, for example. I backed away to reload my weapon and regroup, ducking swiftly out of the hallway and around the corner, out of their line of sight, but the guards' enthusiasm was not dampened. They continued to fire away, unloading clip after clip into the wall; the door slid closed as I stepped away from it again, and the guards continued to fire. I stood there in bewilderment for a full thirty seconds, listening to the guards blast away at the impenetrable door, marveling at their endless ammunition supply and boundless optimism. When I finally opened the door again, there they still were -- still firing, and still exactly where I had left them.
Perhaps it's not the guards' fault. It's possible that they were trained by a drill instructor who spoke to them in the same way everyone else speaks in Exodus From the Earth -- in total nonsense. That same instructor seems to have given them their in-game chatter, in any case, causing them to spout lines such as "I've got you!" and "Fire single shots!" and "Shit, he's smart!" These may not seem wholly inappropriate, but the guards deliver these lines -- especially that last one -- at the most laughably inopportune moments. I ducked around an obstacle for cover and emerged from the other side, three feet from where I had just been: "Shit, he's smart!" I waited patiently while the guards shot the hell out of a closed door for 30 seconds: "Shit, he's smart!" I ran directly up to a solo guard, and shot him at close range in the groin: "Shit, he's smart!"
Don't feel too bad for the guards, however. Their complete lack of tactical sense and self-preservation is balanced out by their uncanny aim and impossibly effective use of the game's weapons. Once a guard has spotted you, survival is a matter of quickly dispatching him before he does too much damage. An alerted guard will never lose sight of you (as evidenced by their insistence on shooting the walls), and they will very rarely miss a shot. This becomes increasingly absurd a few levels into the game, as rifle-toting guards whittle your health down from across the level, making football-field-length shots through tiny gaps in the cover obstacles, using weapons that -- once you have claimed them for your own use -- deliver so much recoil and inaccuracy as to make equivalent return fire literally impossible.
To top it off, the near-future is apparently a fairly boring place to run around in. By the year 2016, mankind simply hasn't advanced enough in the field of architecture to build anything more than the usual "warehouse full of breakable wooden crates," "zero-purpose catwalk," and the old FPS favorite, "sewer corridors that all look identical." It was during that last location, in fact, that with my only listed objective being "Find the Exit," each corridor looking completely the same as the next, and with no map, no compass, and no discernible clue to lead me forward, that I ran around in circles for nearly 40 minutes before quitting the game in disgust. The game may well have become interesting somewhere past this maze of unnavigable corridors, but by that point, I had no inclination to find out.
Exodus From the Earth is the kind of game you'd pick up out of a bargain bin, look at, and throw back. Everything about it is dated and poorly executed, with the possible exception of the graphics, though those would have to be Crysis-quality or better to carry this mess, and you may rest assured, they are not. It plays poorly, embarrasses itself on a regular basis with its non-existent AI and zero-effort localization, and is easily outdone by titles which predate it by 8-10 years. The only reason I can possibly recommend Exodus From the Earth to you is that the mangled translation is, honestly, one of the funniest things I've heard in months. Oh, and that Strategy First wants you to pay for this game. That's pretty funny, too.
Exodus From the Earth is available now for the PC.
You're right about the hilarious voice acting. I smiled every time I heard "Shit! He's smart" and the best one - Guards calling me "milksop." Brilliant.
I can understand your frustrations with the game - There were a couple of levels where I spent ages trying to find the exit. In the end, I resorted to a Babelfish'd copy of a Russian walkthrough... which amazingly helped.
Anyway, the game starts out pretty lackluster, but it does actually pick up - probably around the point where you stopped playing. It actually got pretty fun during the 'escape from the corp HQ' section, which then led into the middle third of the game, involving a lot of driving action, in which you get to drive around outside in a buggy, blasting things with a minigun and running people over, then hopping out of your vehicle to go into a building and achieve some objective, then back in the vehicle again. This was a really strong part of the game - still b-grade but a lot of fun.
The final third of the game takes place on an alien planet and is also good.
Overall, I really enjoyed Exodus From The Earth. I could deal with the dodgy AI and the game got better the more I played it. There were some rather novel ideas in there, as well as some scenes that were amusing for the right reasons (setting off a group of security bots and watching them wipe out the corp goons) and the wrong reasons (the scene in which your buddy utters his dying words and you swear vegeance is PRICELESS). Good boss battle at the end, too.
Bottom line: If you've played b-grade shooters before and can cope with the rough edges, you'll probably enjoy this one. Pick it up for a bargain price sometime, if you see it.
You only played to the sewer level? That's only like 10 minutes into the game. You can't fairly review a game based on only a few minutes of play time.
I don't mind not having a map or compass. It's nice having to figure out what to do sometimes, rather than having a game hand hold you, like a lot of these new games do. Are we at a point today where we need to be hand held through every game now?
I agree about the dialogue, it's pretty funny. But I think it was suppose to be funny, originally. Translation can be bad at times too, but it's what you can expect from games from other countries. The budget isn't always there to get everything right. I liked the main character and I wish he had more one liners throughout the game.
I found the combat pretty challenging. I like to play on the hard settings in games after I get the hang of the controls, and this game was hard. More than once I had to survive with little health and little ammo, and fun moments like that are reasons I like to play games.
I think the gameplay was solid. I think all it was trying to be was an olde school shooter, and that's pretty darn okay in my book.
GameCyte recently moved to a star-based scoring system for game reviews, in which we described a three-star game as the average entry. In my own words, I promised that extreme scores would be "more difficult to obtain as they veer farther to either end of the spectrum," and I meant that -- which is why the five-star rating is heaped with glowing praise, and the one-star rating is cruel and harsh. I defined the low end of the scale in the hopes that we wouldn't have to use it. I take no pleasure in slamming somebody else's hard work, condemning a game that several people probably spent many hours to produce. I promised myself that in order to deliver a really low score, the game in question would have to be full of glaring, undeniable flaws -- problems that any developer could have fixed or avoided with even an ounce of effort. Surely, I believed, nobody would be that lazy or that apathetic about their product. Then, I received a copy of Exodus From the Earth, an action-adventure FPS from Strategy First. I would like to thank the publisher for reminding me why we have these low scores.
If Exodus From the Earth has anything going for it, it is the utter hilarity of its mangled translation. Parallax Arts is a company whose development team operates out of Russia, and this is made obvious by the barely comprehensible dialogue and story text that pervades the game. It may seem unfair to criticize foreign developers for their inability to compose proper English, and perhaps that's true; it's entirely possible that in its native Russian, the narrative and dialogue of Exodus are gripping and intense. However, I did not go to Russia to get this game: It is the intention of Strategy First to publish this title right here in America, and they would like it to be played by American gamers. Pro tip -- when bringing a game to an international market, you will need to put the game through a thorough and professional localization process. Exodus, by comparison, appears to have been localized, for free, by a group of first-week ESL students.
Still, though the localization may be a masterpiece of incompetence, one can easily overlook a game's aesthetics if the gameplay picks up the slack. Exodus From the Earth is out of luck on this count as well, I'm afraid: The game plays like an extremely dated and effortless FPS, slapping a fresh coat of (admittedly) decent graphics on top of unimaginative mechanics, dismal AI, and lousy level design.
Perhaps it's not the guards' fault. It's possible that they were trained by a drill instructor who spoke to them in the same way everyone else speaks in Exodus From the Earth -- in total nonsense. That same instructor seems to have given them their in-game chatter, in any case, causing them to spout lines such as "I've got you!" and "Fire single shots!" and "Shit, he's smart!" These may not seem wholly inappropriate, but the guards deliver these lines -- especially that last one -- at the most laughably inopportune moments. I ducked around an obstacle for cover and emerged from the other side, three feet from where I had just been: "Shit, he's smart!" I waited patiently while the guards shot the hell out of a closed door for 30 seconds: "Shit, he's smart!" I ran directly up to a solo guard, and shot him at close range in the groin: "Shit, he's smart!"
Exodus From the Earth is the kind of game you'd pick up out of a bargain bin, look at, and throw back. Everything about it is dated and poorly executed, with the possible exception of the graphics, though those would have to be Crysis-quality or better to carry this mess, and you may rest assured, they are not. It plays poorly, embarrasses itself on a regular basis with its non-existent AI and zero-effort localization, and is easily outdone by titles which predate it by 8-10 years. The only reason I can possibly recommend Exodus From the Earth to you is that the mangled translation is, honestly, one of the funniest things I've heard in months. Oh, and that Strategy First wants you to pay for this game. That's pretty funny, too.
December 12th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
You're right about the hilarious voice acting. I smiled every time I heard "Shit! He's smart" and the best one - Guards calling me "milksop." Brilliant.
I can understand your frustrations with the game - There were a couple of levels where I spent ages trying to find the exit. In the end, I resorted to a Babelfish'd copy of a Russian walkthrough... which amazingly helped.
Anyway, the game starts out pretty lackluster, but it does actually pick up - probably around the point where you stopped playing. It actually got pretty fun during the 'escape from the corp HQ' section, which then led into the middle third of the game, involving a lot of driving action, in which you get to drive around outside in a buggy, blasting things with a minigun and running people over, then hopping out of your vehicle to go into a building and achieve some objective, then back in the vehicle again. This was a really strong part of the game - still b-grade but a lot of fun.
The final third of the game takes place on an alien planet and is also good.
Overall, I really enjoyed Exodus From The Earth. I could deal with the dodgy AI and the game got better the more I played it. There were some rather novel ideas in there, as well as some scenes that were amusing for the right reasons (setting off a group of security bots and watching them wipe out the corp goons) and the wrong reasons (the scene in which your buddy utters his dying words and you swear vegeance is PRICELESS). Good boss battle at the end, too.
Bottom line: If you've played b-grade shooters before and can cope with the rough edges, you'll probably enjoy this one. Pick it up for a bargain price sometime, if you see it.
December 31st, 2008 at 6:54 am
You only played to the sewer level? That's only like 10 minutes into the game. You can't fairly review a game based on only a few minutes of play time.
I don't mind not having a map or compass. It's nice having to figure out what to do sometimes, rather than having a game hand hold you, like a lot of these new games do. Are we at a point today where we need to be hand held through every game now?
I agree about the dialogue, it's pretty funny. But I think it was suppose to be funny, originally. Translation can be bad at times too, but it's what you can expect from games from other countries. The budget isn't always there to get everything right. I liked the main character and I wish he had more one liners throughout the game.
I found the combat pretty challenging. I like to play on the hard settings in games after I get the hang of the controls, and this game was hard. More than once I had to survive with little health and little ammo, and fun moments like that are reasons I like to play games.
I think the gameplay was solid. I think all it was trying to be was an olde school shooter, and that's pretty darn okay in my book.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:08 am
can anyone tell me where I can get the walk through?
March 9th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Hi iamchaos:
I can't remember where I found the Russian walkthrough, but I put it through Babelfish to create this mangled version:
http://www.devisraad.com/sam/exodus-walkthrough.txt
It helped me more than once!
March 9th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Thanks that was quick. maybe I can get out of the mine now
March 9th, 2009 at 10:28 am
No problem. The walkthrough should give you at least a hint, but if you need any more help, post here and I'll see if I can remember what to do.