If you're looking for a little righteous indignation in your gaming experience, then Left Behind: Eternal Forces might be for you. For those who haven't been keeping track, Left Behind is a rather popular series of books by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins about the rising of the Antichrist on Earth after the Rapture. I know it's popular because the copy of the first book which came with the game says that the series has sold over 63 million copies. That's more than The Da Vinci Code. (Of course, the first Left Behind novel was released eight years before Dan Brown’s own pseudo-religious tome and the sales figure refers to the entire series and not a single book, but why split hairs?)
Left Behind also has a trilogy of movies, starring Kirk Cameron and his wife Chelsea Noble. She'd be best known playing Cameron's second long-term TV girlfriend, Kate on Growing Pains. Not to be confused with the far cuter Julie McCullough, who played his first girlfriend, Julie, the nanny. McCullough was rumoured to have left the show because one of the main cast, possibly born-again Christian Cameron, got her fired because of her Playboy spread a few years before that. But she's featured in the Playboy: The Mansion game and Cameron and Noble have absolutely nothing to do with the Left Behind game so I guess McCullough wins that war.
Essentially the plot of Left Behind is that The Rapture comes and takes all of God's true believers to Heaven naked (their clothes are left on the floor). After which, a battle ensues between the forces of good and evil. There's more but it's not really important.
The game is sort of a cross between Warcraft and SimCity. You recruit and train various individuals to become members of the Tribulation Force and wage religious warfare against non-Christian Global Community Peacekeeper Force led by Nicolae Carpathia, the reincarnation of the Antichrist. (Online, you can play as either side in the divinical war.)
But you can't just take your army guys and kill the enemy. You have to build banks so your people don't go bankrupt, cafes so they don't starve and housing so they’re not derelict. And you usually have to do this before you can do anything else in the mission. Other structures you can build include camps to train other builders, chapels to train disciples to recruit others and musicians, clinics to train medics, military buildings to train soldiers and get weapons and training centres to upgrade your characters. Higher-level builders can also upgrade some buildings.
(Incidentally, Women cannot be trained as soldiers or builders because I guess that's not what good Christian girls are supposed to do.)
Throughout this, you have to keep your characters' spirit level above 60 by praying, otherwise they lose their faith and turn neutral, no longer a member of the Tribulation Force. If this spirit level is lowered even further they will join the other side. You can always recruit them again but they will have lost whatever skill training sets you have given them.
When you complete a mission you will be serenaded by Christian rock (the CD of which you can buy online) and can read about why Christianity is better at explaining the universe than science, whether it be about how Creationism is more believable than Darwinism, information about the makeup of the human eye or how despite the numerous translations over time, the New Testament has only 40 lines that are in dispute. For each of these revelations - or “clues” as the game calls them - there's a link to more related information on their website.
And if during a mission you want to do more reading, you can also click on any character in the game and find out their life story. I have to give the creators credit as they spend a fair bit of effort here. They're not exactly interesting but there are a lot of different backstories to read. Some of the more central characters also have faith stories which explain how they've strayed from the path and why they weren't saved during The Rapture. It's obvious why some of the characters were left behind as their stories explain they are criminals or have a history of violence. But others seem to have led reasonably altruistic lives, some even spiritual. I remember one guy's story went on about how he chose to study various different religions and found many similarities between them and so when the disappearances happened across the globe because he wasn't just studying Christianity he was left behind. And man, was he kicking himself when he noticed that only the Bible could explain what had happened! I also found a bi-polar man named Kevin Arnold who was prone to attacking his family members. I always wondered what happened to him after The Wonder Years ended.
The game is surprisingly sanctimonious when you take into consideration that even the good guys have been forsaken by God. In a sense, it's a battle between the too-little-too-lates and the non-believers, which, essentially, would be anyone who wasn't Christian.
This has raised the ire of religious groups who are boycotting the game for it glorifying the killing of non-Christians. If only that were true. The real problem in the game is that it's so incredibly difficult to get to a point where you can fight the enemy. So many of the story missions consist of endlessly recruiting people and bringing to the chapel and though theoretically you can battle the enemy, there's usually only a small number of buildings you can renovate in a given mission. Most are just there to flesh out the look of city and adorned with billboard ads for PSAs and EBgames. (It’s nice to know that at least one video game store will survive the Apocalypse.)
So often if you build a combat training centre in the earlier missions you have to forego the bank or cafe and you eventually run out of money or food and fail the mission.
And even if you are able to train soldiers, controlling them is a nightmare. You can draw a square with the mouse around a group of people to control them all at once, but often when you tell them to move somewhere they don't respond properly. They might run too far, or behind a building where it's almost impossible to spin the map around to click on them again, or sometimes they just don't move at all and allow themselves to be killed by the bad guys who arbitrarily decide to attack.
It's especially annoying when the game informs you of new objectives or characters speak because text boxes appear and cover part of the screen but the gameplay doesn't stop. So your characters almost certainly get attacked when that happens. And in any mission if you or one of your main characters dies or loses his or her faith, you automatically fail. It’s enough to make you want to punch Jesus in the nose. Or at least Kirk Cameron.
Left Behind: Eternal Forces oscillates between the boring and the aggravating and is far from ever being a rapturous experience.
WHAM! Rating: |
4.5 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
T (Teen) |
Official Web Site: |
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