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IGN Review of Afrika
There's no sense beating around the bush: Afrika is probably the most boring game I've ever played.
Here, you're a freelance photographer living out in the wilds of Africa. You have a do-nothing partner who chills in your tent reading all the time and you accept jobs through the laptop in said tent. You'll choose the job to take, set off into the great outdoors, and photograph the cheetahs, birds, and gazelles living on the continent. When you return with your images, you'll upload them to the computer and send them off to your clients, who will reply with a grade of your overall work as well as your technique and such. They'll also throw some money in so that you can purchase new equipment and the like.
It sounds interesting, but I can assure you, it isn't.
Momma said knock you out. This water buffalo's going to knock you out.
It's not that the photography concept is boring. I was actually looking forward to being out in the bush and carefully framing my shots. What's boring here is how everything is presented and executed. You'll wake up in the tent, choose a job, and then exit. The game loads, and then you're outside talking to your guide or climbing in your Jeep-like ride. There's no voice work in Afrika, so everything pops up as text below the onscreen characters. When you're getting your feet wet, the guide will take you straight to the thing you need to shoot -- need a gazelle? Hop in the back of the car and he'll drive you straight to a gazelle.
I found this guided tour incredibly boring because it was removing the adventure of exploring, but it turns out things only get worse when the guide leaves -- vanishes, even -- and you get to drive the car yourself. The car's just a box on wheels that clips through the ground, and it's sluggish as all hell. Tapping the gas or brake takes a couple of beats to register, small bushes will stop the car in its tracks, and even though this thing's a four-wheel drive vehicle, it can't take on medium-sized hills. When you manage to get the thing stuck, the game fades to black and resets the car.
Still, I'm getting away from the heart of the matter, right? Afrika's all about shooting photos and not driving. Trouble is, even the photos aren't handled that well. When you see something you want to shoot, you bring up the camera with Square, work your orientation and zoom with the stick, and then snap with R1. The whole process is tedious, and -- like the car's controls -- the shutter button is actually pretty sluggish, but it won't matter because the animals will do whatever you need them to do (eating out of trees, looking at you head on, etc.) for quite awhile, because they're pretty stiff and lifeless.
In fact, all of Africa is pretty lifeless in this game. The world is barren -- just a flat grass texture spread out over the world for you to drive across -- and the animals are in very specific places. Having a hippo pool kind of takes away the excitement of going out and looking for hippos. Having just one climbable tree in the first section of the game makes it pretty self-explanatory as to which tree you need to go to in order to take a photo of a giraffe. I expected to be roaming the countryside with a notebook full of things I'd need to shoot and having to carefully pick my shots. In Afrika, you just get one specific quest and drive out to one specific place and shoot the one specific animal.
What's cool is the SixAxis portion of the game. By default, you'll pull out your camera in landscape mode, but rotating the controller as if you're holding a camera will make you shoot vertically.
In that vein, you're going to run into a number of technical mishaps. For starters, there's a seven-minute install at the beginning of the game, but it appears to do nothing to make the title run any better. In fact, Afrika is littered with framerate dips. When you're awkwardly running across a field, you'll see what I'm talking about. When you click on the disc from the XMB, you're looking at more than two minutes of waiting before the game loads and gets you to the actual gameplay. If you choose to save -- and this is every time you save -- expect the process to take one minute and 12 seconds. That's right -- more than a minute of staring at that little progress bar fill before you can do anything.
If you're wondering -- and just about everyone who has stopped by my desk has been -- you can't die in Afrika. If you get too close to the animal, you'll see them starting to get all riled up and you have a few movements to get the hell out of there. If you don't move, the beast will charge at you and you'll wake up at base camp. Similarly, you can't run down animals in your car. If you hit them, the car stops and your lazy partner reprimands you.
©2009-10-06, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Here, you're a freelance photographer living out in the wilds of Africa. You have a do-nothing partner who chills in your tent reading all the time and you accept jobs through the laptop in said tent. You'll choose the job to take, set off into the great outdoors, and photograph the cheetahs, birds, and gazelles living on the continent. When you return with your images, you'll upload them to the computer and send them off to your clients, who will reply with a grade of your overall work as well as your technique and such. They'll also throw some money in so that you can purchase new equipment and the like.
It sounds interesting, but I can assure you, it isn't.
Momma said knock you out. This water buffalo's going to knock you out.
It's not that the photography concept is boring. I was actually looking forward to being out in the bush and carefully framing my shots. What's boring here is how everything is presented and executed. You'll wake up in the tent, choose a job, and then exit. The game loads, and then you're outside talking to your guide or climbing in your Jeep-like ride. There's no voice work in Afrika, so everything pops up as text below the onscreen characters. When you're getting your feet wet, the guide will take you straight to the thing you need to shoot -- need a gazelle? Hop in the back of the car and he'll drive you straight to a gazelle.
I found this guided tour incredibly boring because it was removing the adventure of exploring, but it turns out things only get worse when the guide leaves -- vanishes, even -- and you get to drive the car yourself. The car's just a box on wheels that clips through the ground, and it's sluggish as all hell. Tapping the gas or brake takes a couple of beats to register, small bushes will stop the car in its tracks, and even though this thing's a four-wheel drive vehicle, it can't take on medium-sized hills. When you manage to get the thing stuck, the game fades to black and resets the car.
Still, I'm getting away from the heart of the matter, right? Afrika's all about shooting photos and not driving. Trouble is, even the photos aren't handled that well. When you see something you want to shoot, you bring up the camera with Square, work your orientation and zoom with the stick, and then snap with R1. The whole process is tedious, and -- like the car's controls -- the shutter button is actually pretty sluggish, but it won't matter because the animals will do whatever you need them to do (eating out of trees, looking at you head on, etc.) for quite awhile, because they're pretty stiff and lifeless.
In fact, all of Africa is pretty lifeless in this game. The world is barren -- just a flat grass texture spread out over the world for you to drive across -- and the animals are in very specific places. Having a hippo pool kind of takes away the excitement of going out and looking for hippos. Having just one climbable tree in the first section of the game makes it pretty self-explanatory as to which tree you need to go to in order to take a photo of a giraffe. I expected to be roaming the countryside with a notebook full of things I'd need to shoot and having to carefully pick my shots. In Afrika, you just get one specific quest and drive out to one specific place and shoot the one specific animal.
What's cool is the SixAxis portion of the game. By default, you'll pull out your camera in landscape mode, but rotating the controller as if you're holding a camera will make you shoot vertically.
In that vein, you're going to run into a number of technical mishaps. For starters, there's a seven-minute install at the beginning of the game, but it appears to do nothing to make the title run any better. In fact, Afrika is littered with framerate dips. When you're awkwardly running across a field, you'll see what I'm talking about. When you click on the disc from the XMB, you're looking at more than two minutes of waiting before the game loads and gets you to the actual gameplay. If you choose to save -- and this is every time you save -- expect the process to take one minute and 12 seconds. That's right -- more than a minute of staring at that little progress bar fill before you can do anything.
If you're wondering -- and just about everyone who has stopped by my desk has been -- you can't die in Afrika. If you get too close to the animal, you'll see them starting to get all riled up and you have a few movements to get the hell out of there. If you don't move, the beast will charge at you and you'll wake up at base camp. Similarly, you can't run down animals in your car. If you hit them, the car stops and your lazy partner reprimands you.
©2009-10-06, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved