EGG: Elemental Gimmick Gear (Dreamcast) review "No game in the history of gaming (except perhaps E.T. for the 2600), has made me want to put a hammer to one of my systems more than EGG: Elemental Gimmick Gear, a horrible action-RPG for the Dreamcast from the usually reliable Hudson Soft. "

No game in the history of gaming (except perhaps E.T. for the 2600), has made me want to put a hammer to one of my systems more than EGG: Elemental Gimmick Gear, a horrible action-RPG for the Dreamcast from the usually reliable Hudson Soft.

EGG smells of a PSX project ported over to the Dreamcast. The game's brief 3-D segments look like rough polygon models with a little texturing and anti-alaising. The load times seem to go on for awhile, and the 2-D, hand-drawn graphics have that staticy, muted, and basically ''detached'' look that was so common in early Capcom and SNK efforts on Sony's system.

You play Leon (you can change his name), a guy found in a mechanical egg-shaped robot during an archealogical dig. The scientists say you've been in a coma for 1,000 years. You stay in your little coma for another hundred years while the scientific community in the game's vague world study your ''EGG'' (which looks kind of like Sheldon from that barnyard part of the Garfield and friends cartoon) and make technological advancements on it. When you wake up in some weird bunker, you discover that everyone has EGGs like yours and the world is on the brink of disaster. It seems like they got a high-minded high school sci-fi geek to write the plot.

The game looks like it creeped out of the fourth layer of late Zelda clone/first generation PSX hell. Gameplay is much like the old-school Zelda. You walk around dungeons picking up keys and figuring out solutions to dunder-headed puzzles (move this coloum to open the door, kill all the enemies to get out). The game's afore-mentioned 3-D segements occur either during annoying battles or when you want to get some practice in with a brat who leads a gang of wayward children in the game's first post-apocolyptic town. There aren't many techniques to gain, and you'll probably end up relying on a nifty spin attack that drains your health the longer you use it.

Everything done in EGG is done horribly execept for the opening cinema. It's a mix of 2-D cell and CG backgrounds. It actually looks pretty nice. Character design, if you can call it that, is sub-par, with in-game character graphics looking like hacked sprites from the recent RPG Maker. In fact most of the game looks it was made with RPG Maker. Or an Amiga equipped with BASIC. Compound that all with a narrator that speaks in jilted monotone monologues, and you get an embarrasment in videogamedome. 1,000 monkeys at 1,000 computers could make something eons better than this. Hell, I'm developing a program in Java that ports arabic to roman numerials and that is a lot more exciting and visually stimulating. And it's in DOS.

Why the people at Vatical brought this out is beyond me, espcially when there's stuff like Langriesser and Sakura Wars begging for US release. Avoid this like the plague. Or rent it to see how bad it is.

Community review by pestes (Date unavailable) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.