Review by Taylor

Game by
Frogames

Gameplay: 7
Graphics: 5
Sound: 6
Appeal: 5

Final: 57%

Grade: F

Let’s just say it: Penguin Arena: Sedna’s World is not a quality game. It defies any target audience; It’s too young for the average indie game player, too hidden for younger gaming families, and no mainstream player would ever leave their CoD maps for Arena’s colder pastures. But maybe that’s not the point.

Indie gaming can be a precipice, one to gaze from and see the future ideas and designers of the industry. And there are also games like PASW which are frustratingly content with exacerbating gaming stereotypes. With a ridiculous story, average graphics, vanilla-bread gameplay and – the death blow – an environmental message. I needed to find a lie to play through Penguin Arena.

The game transported me back to elementary school when our whole fifth grade class raced to see which groups of friends could beat all 152 levels of Lode Runner on the Apple II. Would we rather have been playing Killer Instinct? Yes. But it beat learning, and we learned to love it; to this day it’s one of my all-time favorites. No such luck with PASW. I imagine kids will reach for the acres of flash games available to them within five minutes of PASW’s preachy yet bland opening cinema. Basically, global warming is destroying the earth, so a space-asshole named Sedna tells the Penguins that there is only enough food on the planet for one tribe and they better fight to the death because she doesn’t want to have to, you know, decide. Think about that for a moment.

That’s equivalent to if in Captain Planet, Gaia came down after pollution killed most of the world and she gave the planeteers their rings and instead of saying, "work together" she said, "I can only fit one of you in the ship and the rest of you will die, so I would prefer it if you would kill each other for me." It’s unbelievable, and the kind of environmental message that only the Joker could appreciate. It’s so shallow and an obviously tacked-on attempt to add story to an otherwise boring shooter. Except, believe it or not, the developer of this mess is Frogames, a company dedicated to environmental
education through games, which means that, in all likelihood, the story came first, and they thought, "Well what would best illustrate this masterpiece
of storytelling? Answer: First-person shooting death-match action."
It’s insulting. It’s Captain Novolin and 3D Noah’s Ark all over again – edutainmentmthat teaches and talks down to its audience. Well sorry, but that business-model died with full-motion video. To be fair, PASW doesn’t have glaring gameplay flaws like Novolin’s hit detectionmand controls, nor is it a total rip-off like Noah’s Ark was to Wolfenstein 3D. No, PASW has fine controls and hit detection. Even the graphics are charming, in an eMac circa 2002 kind of way. It’s just that everything – its whole aura – is so damn dated.

This is the original unreal tournament with a layer of adorable iced over it. The levels are small (arenas, duh), and the challenge is getting your opponent
low enough that they launch off the side, much like Smash Brothers. However, this amounts to a singular strategy of keeping your back to a barrier and launching snowballs until the round is over. The snowballs are your basic weapon and haven’t been changed in execution since South Park on the N64. The other weapons are all food themed, which is extra insulting because aren’t they supposed to be low on food? Whatever. You got all your basics: Shotgun, missile, etc – but arctic themed, unlike the music.

With pleasant graphics and frantic fun, PASW could entertain you for a while.

In PASW, the music feels like mid-90′s lobby music, or the kind of thing that would play before a game of marble madness. Its bubbly guitar and synth lines are safe and do nothing to add to the atmosphere of the game, probably because the game doesn’t even know what mood it wants to set. Am I sad for the penguins, mad at the world… happy? What?

One of the methodologies at Bungie is that a great game is 30 seconds of fun that you can do again and again. This is what hurts PASW the most. The gameplay is like a first-person shooter interpretation of Smash Brothers, without any drama. You start, you run, you shoot. There’s no break in the style and nothing to worry about outside of shooting. It’s frantic, yes, but it also makes you miss running through the map to find the enemy, or sneaking up on them, or laying low. Strategy is absent, with nothing except stand in front of wall and shoot. It’s gameplay that could only be enjoyed by someone with a five-year-old’s capacity for attention, and most five-year-old’s I know have already started to master CoD and Halo. So who’s left to care for PASW? Nobody.

With pleasant graphics and frantic fun, PASW could entertain you for a while. But when I tried to play online, very few people were playing and rightfully so; PASW is a directionless game that gives nothing back to the FPS genre from which it takes so much. At best, it’s a pleasant afternoon if everything else you own was thrown into a deep hole. And at worst, it represents the nutrition-less side of indie gaming. $20? Buy Braid twice.