Game: 3rd Birthday

Platform: PSP

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Square Enix/HexaDrive

ESRB: M

Genre: Action

Players: 1

What's Hot: Solid controls

What's Not: Repetitive levels; convoluted story; frustrating save system

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Review by: Jason McMaster

Parasite Eve, as far as franchises go, has been quiet for quite some time. Usually, when you release a game that’s part of a series, you want to keep the name recognition and attract your old fans. So, when Square released the ambiguously titled 3rd Birthday without a hint of the Parasite Eve name, I was a bit confused. Then I played the game.

3rd Birthday changes everything. Instead of the survival horror RPG that fans of Parasite Eve expect, this game is all action and button mashing. In fact, the only real horror in this game is the thought of dying in one of the game’s many irritating monster encounters and having to start over. And start over you will. The game is not very liberal with the saves.

You begin the game as Parasite Eve heroine Aya Brea and play as her, in one way or another, throughout. You see, the plot is a bit… complicated. Aya discovers that she can change events in present day by going into the past and changing outcomes in that time. This is facilitated by a machine known as the Overdive System, which allows her to zoom between the humans in the area, recharging her health and ammo as well as positioning the troops for whatever fight you’re currently facing.

This “zoom” ability is called “Overdive,” and she can use it to insert her soul into another person’s body. This is useful in a few different ways. First, it allows you to position troops for a better tactical shot on your enemy and makes it easy to set up the other special shot: “crossfire.” In crossfire, if you target an enemy while near friendly units, they will also target your mark. A bar appears on screen to show you the progress of your teammates’ targeting. Once the targeting bar is full, you can fire to initiate a crossfire attack, causing a barrage of fire on, hopefully, a monster’s weak point. The other use for Overdive is a special attack that lets you do massive damage to a weakened monster by flying into them and exploding… Or something. Either way, the end result is a dead monster, so you got that going for you.

It’s a pretty neat system that works well with the PSPs controls. The targeting and combat feels good, overall, but often drags after a time. The first few encounters are exciting, but you begin to feel a serious sense of déjà vu after killing the same monsters in yet another hallway just to set up another boss encounter. These encounters are the only part of the game that is compelling. Certain bosses require certain strategies and particular positioning, which is where crossfire and Overdive come in handy. Their multi-layer health bars go down a lot slower than you’d really expect, so using your crossfire and Overdive to do larger sums of damage is more of a necessity than an option.

Graphically, 3rd Birthday is one of the nicest looking PSP games. The cut scenes are classic Square fare – highly pre-rendered and polished. The bigger surprise, though, is that once the game jumps to the engine, you might find yourself wondering how they managed to make a portable game this pretty.

To add a bit of replay value and RPG elements, you can upgrade your weapons and Overdive ability. The Overdive ability upgrades are rather baffling, but you can also upgrade your weapons, which is always a good time. Then you can, though not sure why you’d want to, replay the missions for better results. It’s a nice idea that’s not supported by enjoyable gameplay. Crawling through the same hallways killing the same boring monsters doesn’t exactly inspire repeated plays. In the end, 3rd Birthday disappoints Parasite Eve fans and provides a rather mediocre experience for new players. It would be hard to suggest this game as an entry point to the series, or really suggest it at all. If you’re interested in the Parasite Eve story, log in to the PSN (hey it might work again one day!) and download the original. The dated look aside, it’s a much better experience.

Jason McMaster is a regular contributor to GameShark

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