Eat Them! Review

There were plenty of days lost to Rampage on my SEGA Master System. Friends would come over, and we'd side-scroll our way through the world as a giant ape or a giant wolf, destroy buildings, and eat the inhabitants -- the finale coming when Lizzie the lizard reverted back to human form and we got to see a pixelated naked woman. Now, developer FluffyLogic -- creators of the strategy game Savage Moon -- is inviting you to pick up a controller and smash everything in Eat Them!.

With a third-person view and a really slick cel-shaded look, Eat Them lets you create monsters by plugging together arms, heads and other pieces you've unlocked. Then, take out the baddies across a number of different gameplay modes where you smash, kick, roar and jump on buildings and vehicles that have earned your ire. At first -- and definitely in small doses -- this game is full of win. Eat Them looks pretty and runs well as you punch out building walls, hurl fire trucks and dance atop high rises. It's only later when it feels like the same old same old that the game gets tripped up, but I'll get to that.

Get'em out of jail, big guy!

Anyway, all of the actions you take consume your power; so does the damage you receive from the cops and the military. To keep your monster from falling in battle, you need to scoop up passersby and eat them as fuel. (Get the title now?) Missions range from causing as much damage as you can to competing in checkpoint races to polishing off a number of story-based tasks. 

These story-based quests are the highlight of Eat Them because they're clever and challenging. See, in the tale, a mad scientist has whipped up these beasts and is controlling them for his own gain. You'll need to smash a prison and then protect the orange-clad escapees as they make a break for it through the city streets, break open banks and fend off the feds as your getaway cars flee with the money, and so on. Each of these special missions starts off one of Eat Them's worlds/settings, but then you need to medal in each of the challenges a world contains before moving on to the next story segment. 

Here's where Eat Them slips into ho-hum territory. These missions -- the aforementioned cause the most damage and race modes -- can definitely be fun, but you have to do them again and again. As you progress, the destruction challenges get tougher as army men in mechs start showing up and the races won't allow for as much property damage (that's right, you're not supposed to destroy stuff in races), but it's still the same thing over and over again. And I'm talking about being done over and over again in the same world. It's not like you're getting one destruction challenge every time you go to a new area -- you're getting a bunch. 

Eat them all!

Of course, smashing the crap out of a city and leaving it a burning mess of rumble is what this game is about, right? I shouldn't be too hard on it for repeating that same idea again and again. I'd agree with you if the gameplay was flat-out amazing and designed to wow you, but it really isn't. In my experience, I felt like certain moves were doing no damage and I didn't know why. There are challenges that need you to knock down specific buildings in certain periods of time, and I'd be left kicking and punching this one flaming structure and the damn thing wouldn't fall. Why the hell not? I had just destroyed four other buildings, what was I doing wrong here? Why were my kicks not doing anything? My attacks felt like they were whiffing even though I could see them hitting. 

Eat Them packs multiplayer for up to four local players. The cool part is that you can actually play through the story here and unlock new areas. The four-player destruction is fun enough, but the races break the screen into four parts, and the already sensitive camera wigs out even more. I was swinging the camera all over the place trying to find the next objective (which appears as an arrow and can be very hard to see), and by the end of the round, I was carsick.