Retrospective: Project Eden

Project Eden doesn't just want to give you puzzles, it wants to convey an atmosphere of sci-fi spelunking. That's why co-operative puzzles often take a backseat to simply dropping into the shoes of your favourite team member and taking point as the lot of you navigate rickety scaffolding or have a few firefights, and that's why it's unfair to compare it to The Lost Vikings.

To say that Project Eden's lack of interest in traditional puzzles means the game isn't making the most of this four-character mechanic means you're failing to see this mechanic's subtleties. The benefits of giving the player a team to control instead of a lone explorer don't begin and end at contrived puzzles. Project Eden's limp combat is saved by the way your team all open fire at the moment you're ambushed, and more significantly the fact that you're swapping between perspectives forces you to see your team as individuals rather than faceless avatars.

The game's thick foreboding is heightened as you tug these lost men and women first through riotous explosions and destruction, and eventually down to where everything weak has already rotted away, leaving the stillness and moss of death.

Where Project Eden does fail is that despite this whole dramatic setup your team displays an icy, professional stoicism throughout the entire game, which robs them of the personality and chatter that should have been the game's driving force.

It would have created a perfect cycle - the team's despair would keep you playing, so you'd push the team deeper, and the team would go even madder. But outside of the scant, brief cut-scenes you might as well be steering around four robots. Although that's a poor choice of words - your robot, Amber, is actually the only distinctive character on your team.

Amber is a glance at what Project Eden should have been - as a kind of bulky sister to Robocop, Amber is only really used when you need someone to go wandering headfirst through fire, steam, noxious gas, electrified flooring or whatever other hazards you stumble across.

Poor Amber. It's hardly the most imaginative of talents, but compared to the rest of your tedious team (specialising as they do in repairing things, hacking things and, in your spectacularly underqualified commander's case, nothing but opening high clearance doors), Amber's a card. She also boasts a little rocket launcher in her wrist and she's so big that your viewpoint goes leaping up whenever you take control of her, making tight corridors seem that much more claustrophobic.

Why couldn't the rest of your team have received this kind of attention to detail? It wouldn't have taken much. Make nerdy Minoko a little smaller and faster, give tech-specialist Andre a stronger shield, lend captain Carter a first aid kit. And while you're at it, give the team some incidental chats to have as they probe the undercity.

There's one bit very early on where the destruction of a bridge ends up splitting your team in two, and you have to spend the better part of an hour trying to re-unite them. The level reaches a climax with the slightly drastic play of sending Minoko sprinting through a garbage crusher to the waiting arms of her friends. It's a powerful idea, but there's nowhere near enough of it throughout the game.

As much as I might want to distance Project Eden from The Lost Vikings, this is one lesson to which it could have paid more attention. The Lost Vikings had its protagonists bickering between levels, and this was all it took to give that game hopeless charm.

Once the player's under this spell, convinced of the personalities of their team, you don't even have to do anything - every trap or scrap of co-op becomes more engaging because it's happening to these characters the player's gotten to know.

The only other regret I have about Project Eden is that it ends in an overwhelmingly ninetie mutant laboratory, when really it should have had a final level set in some fossilised vision of the 21st century. Your shiny, tired future-squad could have ended up crawling through a compacted obstacle course of brittle cathedrals and mouldering pubs.

But then I'm just still trying to crowbar personality into a game which really doesn't seem to want it. Shame. The tiniest bit of heart in any creation goes such a long way.