The PlayStation era 3 holds or some of my favorite memories of video games. While there were some cool big titles I enjoyed, I was mostly enveloped in indie games. PixelJunk came out with PixelJunk Monsters which innovated a lot of tower defense ideas and I spent many hours in that game. And then they created PixelJunk Eden; not only was the gameplay unique and entertaining, but it was also entrancingly beautiful and almost therapeutic. Now, PixelJunk Eden 2 has arrived and it may capture a lot of the aesthetic of the first game, but the gameplay flow feels a bit simplified and clunky.
Like I mentioned above, the game is beautiful. The contrasting colors, unique plants, and flowing environments look really great on the television in hand-held mode on the Switch. Along with the great visuals, the music and sounds are all crisp entrancing. I do wish I was a bit more customization in the characters and color balancing because things can get a bit hectic or busy on screen.
The gameplay here is fairly simple. A player will collect pollen to create plants in order to get to other places to collect more pollen until they eventually reach a final spore. It isn’t the end of the level that’s so intriguing, but it’s in the journey. Swinging from plant to plant and gathering pollen and growing the area is what makes this game engaging and fulfilling. This is where I think PixelJunk made poor choices in design. In the first game, players have a lot of control over their character, the way that they would swing, and what things that they will interact with. But here, swinging and momentum are forced on players, making it more about pointing and throwing yourself in any direction and then course correcting if needs be. Changing the basic controls and general momentum and movement of the game was a step in the wrong direction. This new direction takes away from a lot of the finesse of the original game and feels rather.
There is a pretty large amount of content here, lots of levels and things to unlock and environments to see. But the core gameplay of moving from plant to plant and collecting pollen isn’t all that smooth and makes the journey as a whole far less entertaining. Once a player gets in the flow of things, it does play mostly fine. If you’re a big fan of the original, it might be worth checking out just to be back in that world.
