Bionicle
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- Genre: Third person adventure
- Format: DVD
- Developer: Lego Interactive
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Mac Port: Zonic
- Mac Publisher: Feral Interactive
- Minimum System Requirements: 1GHz G4, Mac OS X v10.2, 256MB RAM, 1.5GB free disk space, hardware accelerated 3D graphics card with 32MB VRAM, DVD Drive, mouse and keyboard
- Review Computer: 1.5GHz 17" PowerBook with 512MB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (AGP 4X) graphics processor with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
- Network Feature: None
- Price: $40.00
- ESRB Rating: E for Everyone
- Availability: Now
- Official Website: [url=http://www.lego.com]http://www.lego.com[/url]
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
- Dorothy Parker
I was looking forward to Bionicle. I've always enjoyed Lego building systems (not "Legos," damn you), but you also have to understand that I came from an age when Lego sold "blocks" that you were expected to "put together." Do they still do that?
Anyway, with the kids today it's all Bionicles, which look very much like robots but apparently aren't. They are, in fact, "Toa," the mystical guardians of the light who fight Makuta, who also looks like a robot, but isn't. As you might expect, the bad guy shows up and it's the job of the good guys to fight his endless stream of ever-more-powerful henchmen while increasing their own power. If he were thinking about this at all, the villain would send his most powerful henchmen out right away to crush the heroes before they became powerful enough to challenge him. But then I guess that wouldn't be much fun.
And that's what Bionicle is: not much fun.
The problem with the game, the crippling problem with the game, is that it's a console port, and is meant to be played with a console controller. Your camera perspective and your character movement are two different control sets, but they overlap each other. If you tell your character to move forward, he doesn't move the way he's facing, he moves away from you, that is "forward" from your camera perspective. And since most of this game involves jumping—sometimes very precise jumping—this is a critical problem.
In fact, one of the first major puzzles you come to involves jumping over lava (there is a special hidden level of hell for game designers who put jumping puzzles over lava in their games). You must jump from stone to stone, of course, but the stones are moving, will sink if you stand on them too long, and there is a boss at the end of the tunnel who fires at you as you get closer. Try to imagine just how much fun this is when you can't accurately gauge your jumps because (and this is the real kicker) changing your camera perspective changes your character's direction even in mid-jump.
Bionicle has other irritants as well. For one thing, while you can save at any point in the game, if you die, you come back to the beginning of a section with all the enemies reanimated. You cannot skip the cut scenes, nor can you skip the helpful hints that become exceedingly less helpful as you try to get past the same enemies you've killed for the twelfth time. Assuming, of course, the cut scene makes sense. After defeating a boss, I was abruptly in the middle of a light show that ended without explanation, leaving me in a new location. Turns out that I'd rescued enough workers to open another door (one of my objectives from earlier in the game) but the cut scene didn't bother to explain that this was happening. Also, you get three save positions per character, but you can't load a save from within the game—you have to quit and load from the first menu.
The graphics are lush, but there's a disconnect between the gorgeous environments rendered and the characters. The jungle looks like, well, a jungle. I was reminded of the environments of Pikmin, where a miniature astronaut must make his way around objects like D-cell batteries which take on monolithic proportions. The environments in Bionicle are gorgeous. But all the characters look like they're made out of Lego blocks (which, of course, they are) and come off as crude and clunky, especially the enemies.
Characters are given infinite lives (which they'll need) and fight by using their elemental powers which drain their energy reserves. They can rebuild their energy reserves by activating a shield at the exact moment an enemy hits them, or by absorbing energy around them (best done with the enemies are dead).
If you have a console controller, Bionicle might be a very different game for you. But for those using the keyboard interface, a confusing movement interface combined with aggravating storytelling makes for a game that less fun than stepping on a yellow four-prong brick.
