Ben 10 Omniverse

Christmas is a wonderful time of year. It gives you an excuse to buy games for younger people and then play them for easy achievements. This was exactly the case for Ben 10 Omniverse. I managed to smash the whole thing out in the space of an afternoon in just over 5 hours.

Anyway, I don’t really know that much about Ben 10 but the story seems to be some evil dude that absorbs technology absorbs Rook’s energy gun from the future when Rook accidentally gets teleported into the past and bad things happen in the future. Rook then teleports between the future and the past as Ben and Rook try to fix the timeline (featuring two different Bens in the future and the past.)

As this is a game for kids, I won’t even talk about the continuity issues with someone continuously travelling back and forth through time but the one thing I did like is that the game does acknowledge the problem with it, even if it doesn’t do anything about it.

Looks wise and sounds wise it was alright. Cartoony graphics are exactly how the game should be and I have no idea how authentic the sound is because I’ve never watched the show. However, it didn’t get annoying but that may be because of how quickly I completed it.

The gameplay... despite all of the plot points focusing on Rook, you actually play as both Bens in the future and the past. Ben has the Omnitrix which allows him to transform into several different aliens, all of which have completely the same attacks, heavy or normal. As they level, they develop the same combo attacks and the only things you really need to use anyone other than Diamondhead for is he individual alien-specific actions.

What I am laboriously trying to get to here is that there is a lot of potential to develop these alien creations to be variable and different, however the developers have decided not to do this and have them all behave exactly the same in combat. That said, this may have been an actual decision as the game is intended for a lower age bracket.

I only came across two issues with the gameplay. The first one, and the worst one, is the mishaps with the AI. There are several instances where you need computer controlled Rook to stand on a switch, or do something useful. There was one occasion where he wouldn’t do this so thinking I was being clever, I plugged in a second controller and moved him to where I wanted him to stand. However, this caused the game to glitch out and the camera not to follow me through the rest of the level – game breaking fail.

I’ve actually thought of something else while writing this – the AI combat is stupid. Rook will constantly get in your way and steal your kills instead of fighting other bad guys in the area. This is very frustrating but I’ll go into more detail on this later.

The final issue I had, which is probably more to do with me being shit at games, is that the bottomless pits and jumping capacity seem to be a bit unbalanced. You have to time your jumps exactly right in order to get over some gaps and if you miss it is instant death – quite unforgiving for the younger generation – and led to several hissy fits from the 8-year-old playing it. Honestly.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 46 Achievements  

Throughout my first playthrough, I managed to nab all but two of the achievements. These included all storyline based achievements, all the achievements for the kills with each alien and for fully upgrading both Rook and Ben.

Normally I don’t complain about the ease of achievements, but the fact that Rook auto-upgrades himself throughout the game seems a bit silly. The game builds the character for you which is like having a reward for doing nothing.

The other issue I had was with Rook continually killing the enemies I was fighting when trying to rack up kills as Ben. This really began to fuck me off as you fight four enemies at a time and he always started attacking the one I was working on.

The two achievements left at the end was for collect all Codon Crystals, which basically means I missed one collectible item and for opening 75 Tech thingies which I don’t think is possible in one playthrough anyway.

Downloadable Content – N/A

And that’s it; a really easy game for the achievement collectors and possibly some fun for the kids as well. I won’t be going back to it though.