Earth Must Die Review – Being a Space Emperor Has Never Been This Petty – WGB

From the minds of Lair of the Clockwork God and The Swindle comes a brand new sci-fi adventure game filled with British humour, at least one alien sex orgy, and enough puzzles to make you question why you even bothered getting out of bed this morning.

Normally, I don’t mention the price when talking about games, but with Earth Must Die the £12 asking price is probably going to do more to sway you than any of my poorly chosen words might, so let’s get it out of the way. That price bags you a roughly four to six hour adventure game filled with good puzzles and some snappy humour, wrapped up in some very pretty graphics.

Available On: PC
Reviewed On: PC
Developed By: Size Five Games
Published By: No More Robots

The opening scene sets the sci-fi stage nicely: VValak Lizardtongue is the third spawn of the Emperor of a massive space empire, and most definitely not the favourite of the three. His big, brave, heroic siblings are in line for the throne, except that a convenient rebellion allows VValak the opportunity to… er, climb the corporate ladder, so to speak. A bit of smart-assery, followed shortly by his father having a metal girder blasted through his spine, opens the way to VValak taking the throne and ruling.

Skip ahead a bit and things are going mostly OK. Except the empire is running out of a certain mineral that the whole thing needs to function, so VValak makes the call to scan a sector of space his father had blocked off. Why? Turns out the bloody thing has Humans in it, and as soon as the Humans notice VValak’s empire knocking, they come rocking. With big-ass ships. And space lasers. And generally just being Humans. Now, VValak has a bit of a problem.

VValak continues the point-and-click tradition of featuring protagonists who are arseholes. He gives not one iota of a fuck about his subjects or their suffering, and a throwaway line about his refusal to carry anything is a funny way of letting the developers design a puzzle game without an inventory. VValak is rude, crass, annoying, and haughty. Perfect point-and-click fodder, really.

Actually, rude and crass describes a lot of the game’s humour. Earth Must Die really likes its sex jokes, which is why it has a disclaimer on the Steam store page warning that the game features an alien orgy. Not that you can see anything interesting. Trust me. I looked. Closely. There’s also a distinctly British vibe to the humour, which I enjoyed. That makes sense, as Earth Must Die is a British-made title, featuring a wealth of British voice talent too. In fact, the line-up is impressive considering the presumably small development budget. Like, Benn Starr, of Expedition 33 fame? Nice. Performances are strong across the board, delivering every line with enthusiasm and that vaguely sarcastic tone that is basically the default setting for us Brits.

Looking at the gameplay, it’s precisely what you’d expect from an adventure game like this, but with one or two small tweaks. The controls are a little different in that you move using WASD instead of just clicking around. More importantly, VValak’s dislike of having to touch anything means he doesn’t have an inventory, which in turn means you don’t spend heaps of time mashing items together like you’re trying to force them into shooting a porn flick. The solution to most puzzles is usually within the screen you’re standing in, or nearby. He also likes to order people around, including his loyal robot Milky — a nursing bot from when he was a wee toddler, and now his only friend.

And speaking of Milky, she likes to keep a running “Milkapedia” of everything she finds and knows, which is quite often a vital source of information. Yes, there’s a bit more reading in Earth Must Die than you might have expected.

Puzzles and story are the keys in a game like this, so how were the puzzles overall? Solid. Adventure games like this have a problem these days where it feels like they’ve hit a wall in terms of gameplay evolution and puzzle design. I’ve discussed this before and don’t really hold it against them anymore because, honestly, I don’t know where the genre can go from here either. There were a couple of standout moments, mostly based around VValak weedling his way through situations using speech, while the rest were all rock-solid, classic examples of point-and-click adventure design.

The ending, though, felt abrupt. Again, it’s a problem with this kind of game, as it can be a struggle to build a gameplay crescendo that properly matches the story, meaning endings can feel anti-climactic. The way this one ends is likely to be a love-it-or-hate-it scenario — personally, I thought it made perfect sense given everything that happens leading up to it.

There’s nothing here that actively holds Earth Must Die back, but it never quite pushes beyond being a great adventure game into the territory occupied by the very best the genre has to offer.

Earth Must Die. Aside from being a statement of fact at this point (are any of us actually having fun anymore?), it’s also a damn good point-and-click adventure. It’s never quite laugh-out-loud funny, but it does manage to keep a permanent smirk on your face, and that sense of humour is backed up by enjoyable, well-constructed puzzles.