When I was a film major last year, in a class that was to serve as an introduction to film narrative, I learned of a guy named Bertol Brecht. He was a German playwright who thought that if you wanted to pass a message on to the audience (usually involving Marxist theory) you must detach the audience from the play. You cannot let your audience get caught up in a story or to show sympathy with characters because they will not understand your message and be too caught up in your story, or so the theory went.
UFO Interactive's Seventh Cross: Evolution successfully detaches the gamer away from its experience. The Marxist theory is not present here, replaced by Social Darwinism. None of that won't matter, though, since you'll be chucking this giga-disc out of you system within 15 minutes to go play some more NFL 2K.
7th Cross has you as creature climbing out of the ooze to grow and evolve over time, destroying all that is week in your path. And that is it actually. That's all you do. There is no story, there are no characters. It's as if Brecht came back and got REALLY bored and decided to help and a bunch of Japanese programmers. I mean, all you'll do in this game is wonder around and kill stuff. That's it. You will gain levels and distribute experience points, but still, all you'll do is bang away at smaller enemies and have bigger enemies killing you at every turn. Even worse, it takes an ungodly 173 memory card pages to save your progress. And to think publishers believe Sakura Wars won't go down with US gamers because it has dating segments.
The graphics are something else. They look like that computer animation stuff that goes along with John Tesh in ''Natural Wonders.'' The whole world is quite bland and it never seems to change.
The sound is nearly non-existent. You'll hear nothing but some cruddy sound effects that could've been done on a Colecovision when you hit enemies, or swim. The only music is this funky techno/porno music when you pick 6 colors to represent certain aspects such as strength and defense and PSI (which never figured in when I played).
The less said about this game the better. It's a little more impressive than EGG was, but not by much. This game has been floating around with a $15 price tag at places like EB and Software ETC so if you see somebody considering a purchase, for the love of God stop them!
