EarthNight (PS4)
In the game EarthNight, dragons have suddenly appeared and taken over Earth and it seems that humanity has just thrown up their hands and accepted this new state of affairs. If you only go by the information the game itself provides it can actually be a little confusing to tell if this is even a bad thing and besides an image with a destroyed city and humans standing baffled beside a tank it almost doesn’t seem like humanity even tried too hard to resist this sweeping change. If you look at things like the official website or the game’s Steam store page you can get a few more details about what happened, the flying dragons did in fact wipe out Earth’s governments and military forces and humanity has even been forced to live out in space. Once you’ve done this outside research to understand what’s truly going on in EarthNight, you can finally start to appreciate the bravery of Stanley and Sydney as they seem to be the only two humans left willing to try and plunge back down to the planet to wipe out the conquering dragons.
EarthNight is a 2D platforming autorunner, the player already running to the right as soon as the action starts and progress dependent on jumping at the right times and controlling your speed. What makes this process more conceptually exciting though is the fact that you’re actually running across the backs of the long dragons that fly through the various layers of Earth’s atmosphere. The ground beneath your feet is actually the scaly hide of on your enemies, and as you run along these enormous creatures you’ll be treated to some striking visuals. In the background you can see other dragons flying about the air, when you plunge down to a new dragon after killing one you can see them worming through the clouds, and there are plenty of unusual and surreal background details to make the game truly a visual treat. Some design choices seem to almost lean into the intentionally ugly or absurd with the monster designs and character expressions, but an artist named Mattahan produced a wide array of hand drawn illustrations that blend together to really bring the fantastical concept of running across dragons in the sky to life.
The enormous dragons are decently sized so that levels are brisk but not too short, and truthfully, being on the dragon’s back is not where you usually want to be. Floating above the dragon’s back will be platforms with enemies, goodies, and secrets to try and collect as you charge forward towards the beast’s head with the actual back of the creature usually just has a collection of foes and low value treasure if you take that low road. Rather than each dragon being a tailor-made experience though, the game generates a level by chaining together different platforming presets, and while the phrase “procedurally-generated dragon” is a fun one, this pseudo-randomization is one of the game’s first big problems. The arrangement of the platforms in the sky is often rather spread out and indistinct, very few of them feeling like they have a good conceptual basis since they are pretty much elements stuck together without much of a human touch. With the dragon’s surface already rather bland, the platforms above it are meant to carry the experience but often feel too generic to provide exceptional or memorable challenges.
The game does try to provide some variation as you get deeper into a play session though. Things kick off with you diving down from space and then proceeding through the different layers of the atmosphere, the player fighting different dragon types along the way. While things start with dragons who are defined by their coloration, later layers include things like dragons made out of stone, ones made out of unusual material like shag carpets, or ones with animal features like the feathered chicken dragon. Depending on the atmospheric layer they fly about in you’ll encounter different sets of platforms and foes so that helps stave off some of the repetition, but within their own space these still face the issue of lacking truly defining features beyond aesthetics and the required difficulty level of their area. This can be worked around a bit since you do have control of your character while falling between dragons and you can even weave around almost every dragon on the way to Earth’s surface so you only technically need to complete the first, middle, and last levels, but doing so as you start the game would be incredibly difficult because EarthNight adds rogue-like elements on top of its procedural generation.
Being a rogue-like means a death in EarthNight will require you to start a new session to try again with any collected power-ups gone and certain elements along the adventure randomized to theoretically provide a new experience. This already doesn’t work out too well with the level designs, but the game actually does a fairly poor job justifying the repeat playthroughs in the rewards you get for playing over and over. The treasures that are scattered in abundance atop the dragons are redeemed for water, this game’s money system, and while theoretically these can be used to buy upgrades to make future runs easier, there are some issues with how this system is realized. Almost all of the power-ups you can pick up during a run can be unlocked by just defeating a dragon of a certain type so wasting water unlocking them early doesn’t provide too many benefits. You can buy costly costumes that provide no actual benefits, you can upgrade your water tank so you can hold more water that you don’t have much use for, and you can buy upgrades for the power-ups but run into a different issue. Rather than just having a monetary cost, these also require you to have collected items from the dragons, be they the dragon eggs that make the face-off at the head easier or the actual piece you remove during the battle with head. You only get a head piece once per dragon level and the eggs are hidden about but still there are only three to grab per dragon and finding them is up to luck since you can never predict what’s ahead in a stage that is not only wide but filled with a lot of vertical space so you can’t always see anything useful or dangerous ahead, above, or below.
The dragon pieces make the upgrades so costly that you’d really need to put in time to start purchasing them, and that’s where this game’s mobile game roots come to bite it. While it had no in-app purchases on the Apple store it is still designed perhaps too much around the idea of it being a game you play repeatedly in small bursts even though the actual content is rather shallow due to the procedural generation of the levels. There are some pre-set areas like the Crystal Light Dragon deciding two slow tunnels with electrified dragon flesh should be a required part of every playthrough unless you find the secret warps to skip that dragon, but the game still very much feels like you aren’t supposed to see too much of it in a row because you’ll realize it’s lacking in any well designed platforming challenges. Adding in reasons to replay it over and over doesn’t undo this issue, and even when you do start to get power-ups, you’ll start to realize they have issues too.
Stanley and Sydney cannot carry any permanent upgrades, all of the ones they find out on the dragons fading gradually over time and wasting away even more quickly through use. Stanley might unlock a sword useful for fighting the abundant enemies on the dragon’s back, but he must find it in the levels and it will fade away rather quickly so how much it helps is limited. There is an extra life leaf that thankfully only disappears on use, but other benefits are fleeting or even potentially not worth grabbing if you see them. The power-ups that pixelate the world some or turn it black and white technically provide small benefits like increasing the multiplier on your treasure collection at the cost of making things harder to play. This does mean you have to perform well to beat the game rather than being carried by useful items, but with the amount of blind jumps inherent in the design it feels like the game could have afforded to be more generous or at least given you the means to hold onto more interesting abilities for a bit.
All of these poorly conceived mechanics actually surround a platforming core that can have its moments. Stanley and Sydney both control differently, Sydney being the obvious choice to pick if you want to succeed though since she has a double jump that is so absurdly useful it almost invalidates Stanley’s slight advantage that his sword items let him kill enemies simply by touching them. Stanley can be seen as the hard mode, but since he only has one jump and you’re often running ahead into unknown lightly randomized territory, overcommitting to a jump and not knowing it was a risk until the screen scrolls enough really makes playing as Stanley prone to frustrating dangers. You can change a difficulty setting to provide double health and health can be regenerated by bouncing across enemies in an uninterrupted chain, but Stanley still feels like he’s a huge step down from Sydney’s increased aerial maneuverability. You can plummet down quickly to try and cut your flight path short which is good for hitting enemies or landing on the floating platforms, and with Sydney’s extra jump you can even account for the surprises ahead so the blindness of them becomes less aggravating. There is an item that provides an additional jump so Stanley can taste the freedom of movement that makes things more bearable, but the boots fade away all too quickly so he really does feel like a flawed concept for higher difficulty.
Fighting the dragon’s head is at least fairly straightforward with both characters. Dragons technically don’t fight back but will get unruly and try to shake you about while you’re trying to stab their faces. Different types require different approaches for the face stabbing and besides the final boss you technically don’t even need to defeat a dragon to keep going, this more peaceful approach even being the basis behind one of the alternate endings. Secrets can be found if you’re lucky, many of them unfortunately hard to deliberately find when you’re looking for them since the random elements and the unreliability of even being in the right layer of the vertical level to notice they’re lingering about really discourages efforts to look for them. These are optional even though they’re perhaps too obtuse to be worth the effort unless you happen to bumble into them, so once more it feels like EarthNight lets down an idea that could have given its more longevity and appeal if it had been handled better.
One thing that can at least be said about EarthNight is how the pileup of issues can fade into the background when you’ve got a good set of upgrades and a rhythm going even though the design prevents it from having that driving factor to make the game truly worth playing as much as it asks you to. There’s some nice energetic music to give more energy to running across the sometimes gorgeous dragons and Sydney gives you the means to at least have a chance of reacting to the areas ahead if they are more dangerous than anticipated, but it seems like it coasts a lot on good looks and the speed of the action. Anything beyond the basic reflexive reactions to seeing what’s ahead feels like it is not properly implemented to support that play, so the experience gets dragged down more and more if you do play it for more than a few minutes.
THE VERDICT: EarthNight can almost be breathtaking with it hand-drawn artwork that gels well with the idea of majestic but dangerous dragons flying through Earth’s atmosphere, but little else in this platformer is executed well. While the autorunner concept on show could have had legs, it seems to make misstep after misstep in how it tries to add to the action. The dragons themselves are shallow in design and consist of mixed together level pieces that lack identity or unique challenges, secrets and upgrades are obtuse or not really worth pursuing, and you don’t get to see enough of what’s ahead or above to really do much more than hope you react in time or took a lucky blind jump to grab useful things and avoid danger. The actual platforming as Sydney can be decent when you start to recognize things and have a few power-ups unlocked for brief boosts, but the small window where the game becomes decent and the prep work involved in getting there can’t erase how most of the systems in EarthNight have some bad decision implemented into how they’re designed.
And so, I give EarthNight for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. I do realize this review has mostly been piling on more and more issues with its design, but there was a brief moment I considered it might be worthy of an OKAY rating. This was mainly because I had reached the point of the game where finally things were starting to feel like they flowed decently enough… but I was also skipping dragons often and still tired of the repetition in the ones I did drop in on. It’s a game where quickly you want to avoid dragons unless you want to grab something specific and even then the process of finding secrets, collecting dragon parts, or just trying to complete the level is made tedious instead of thrilling. Poor Stanley is denied the means to deal with how much of the game you can’t accurately predict because of the randomized platforming layouts and he can miss so many important things because a dragon egg or special item wasn’t on screen until it was too late for him to have a chance to reach it. Sydney’s aerial control is key to the moments where things do threaten to work better, and while difficulty isn’t too skewed towards being easy or hard for her, levels still lack flavor because they’re cut from fairly bland cloth. All the nice artwork and appropriate music it brings to bear can’t cover up how the action is supported primarily by flimsy mechanics and poor excuses for replayability.
EarthNight is a game that didn’t even get presenting its setup right, so seeing how it goes on to squander most everything else isn’t too surprising. For a quick play it can be pretty harmless, but judging a game on barely engaging with it doesn’t feel right. Once you go across a few dragons the shallowness becomes all too abundant and the depth that the game tries to add to it simply stretches things thinner. If the dragons presented unique tailored challenges this would be a much more engaging experience, and while I don’t want to completely dismiss procedural generation and rogue-like elements, they do not work well for the design behind this autorunner. Not being able to see important things ahead, having the reward for grinding up dragon parts be so minimal, and making stages so generic and similar you start avoiding them more than playing them is where it fails in those departments. It can’t handle the rogue-like genre’s core elements despite there being some potential in the character movement, but EarthNight had its head in the clouds and so a game about running across dragons in the sky ends up lacking the creativity in anything but the art department when it comes to realizing that concept.