Bridging game genres is never easy, as mixing fans and mechanics can lead to catastrophic economic failures. Video games that manage to do this however, as among some of the best in existence, seamlessly blending incredible audio, amazing narrative and features that are sought out by millions worldwide. Titles like BioShock, Fallout 3, Shadow of the Colossus and Half Life 2 are just some to mention.
Albedo: Eyes from Outer Space isn't one of these few masterpieces unfortunately. It sits on the awkward side of this fence, mixing a range of ideas from puzzle games, first person shooters and point and click genres that creates something not quite brilliant but instead, wholly unique and weirdly interesting.
Set in an alternate, surreal 60's world that is filled with aliens and overly dramatic art styles, Albedo: Eyes from Outer Space carves out its own persona among the more modern, bland titles that struggle to do so. It takes real creativity to give a universe like this a true vibrancy and feel, although, this is lost within the first twenty minutes.
However, you fill the beer swilling boots of night watchman John T. Longy, who is responsible for guarding over the Jupiter laboratory. On this one evening though, you're caught in a freak explosion that takes out part of the reception floor and sends you flying down through into the basement, where the game starts, and then starts to get frustrating.
Within mere minutes you begin to understand just how little the game gives you to work with and it's very difficult to understand. You're told to “make a trap” but not given any hints on how to do it or what to use, this makes it more annoying right from the get go. Puzzle games aren't my forte, I'll admit that, but the first room took about thirty minutes to solve properly.
Other puzzles are similarly as mind bending, with later additions suffering massively from poor texture quality and bad lighting overall. From a distance the key item or thing is simply a dark panel or worse, a blotch of messy pixels. The pits and spikes in difficulty don't help either, as the room-by-room puzzles vary from child’s play to insane.
Progression of this game isn't fantastic, due to the clunky controls, poor button and action mapping and the fact that it has the total pacing of any given episode of The Walking Dead. To access the item inventory you have to press up on the d-pad, then scroll to the item you want, then you need to actually equip the item itself to use it in whatever manner you so wish to use it. If you press the wrong action button, you have to start the whole process over again and it's infuriating.
That is the tip of the iceberg however, when it comes to the awkward gameplay. The action and fighting in this game is horrid, every time you go to hit any of the enemies the player camera jumps forward into the abomination that you just punched, or attempted to punch. I've never come across any other game where actually attacking an enemy is more difficult than some of the puzzles that are presented to you.
Aside from the little problems, Albedo really falls down most when it comes to its audio and smooth finish on graphics. The voice acting sounds slightly forced and doesn't always match the subtitles shown on screen and while that isn't a game breaker, it's like the final nail in the coffin after the four, painful hours that I crawled through this game.
I feel as Albedo could have been something truly wondrous if they just cleaned it up more and polished it using a patch or DLC content. As is however, it's a bizarre disaster that meshes together seemingly the worst elements from some of the best parts of gaming.
Albedo: Eyes from Outer Space * * * * *
Matt Dawson
