Evil Twin - Cyprien’s Chronicles
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Review of Evil Twin - Cyprien’s Chronicles
One dark and stormy evening, in the village orphanage, a young boy named Cyprien is having a bad day. Although his friends have gathered to celebrate his birthday Cyprien cannot enjoy such a day as it still holds awful memories from his past. You see, today is also the anniversary of his parent’s death. As his mood swings from bad to worse Cyprien storms out on his four buddies and goes to his bedroom. As he continues the obscenities (with his teddy bear being the latest target) some strange things are happening back in the main room. His four friends are suddenly sucked away to another world constructed by Cyprien’s imagination and the young spiky haired orphan is soon to follow for a series of weird and challenging adventures.
Evil Twin is a tricky 3D adventure game with plenty of platform styled elements (such as jumping from ledge to ledge over water, lava etc), set in a fantasy dream world where anything strange can happen… and usually does. The main objective is to guide Cyprien across varied challenges, find his friends from the orphanage, and finally destroy the Master.
Following the cinematic opening movie you’ll find it hard not to be impressed by the in-game visuals. I was initially quite taken aback by the gloomy surrounding but upon further inspection the general settings have a unique artistic style that I don’t recall seeing in any other game. The best way I can find to offer any comparison would be to imagine flicking through a series of printed images and then suddenly come across an oil painting. The characters (over 100) are also incredibly believable and would conjure up an image of just what lurks in the corner of many children’s dreams.
Although the dingy visuals add a certain amount of atmosphere to the proceedings they also cause a few problems when it comes down to getting on with the gameplay. Spotting switches and especially newly created opening can be a nightmare and perhaps a brief animation pointing out the location of a recent unveiling of an exit or entrance would stop an awful amount of needless backtracking.
The style of play follows the usual platform formula of collecting floating icons scattered around the levels. Some pick-ups have healing abilities, such as the bandage, or even offer an extra life. You actually hold control over two main characters because if Cyprien collects sufficient special flame icons he can transform into his evil twin, SuperCyp. SuperCyp has a wealth of moves that aren’t available to Cyprien. He can shoot enormous fireballs, perform a lightning bolt attack and reach high places by using his super jump. Control is a little bit twitchy (especially when walking across narrow, twisting platforms such as a tree branch), but using the first person perspective view can ease the pain of shooting enemies.
The level designs are very good with one main location leading to several sub levels. A great deal of thought has obviously gone into designing the sections and no two are similar. For example, one of them involves jumping across floating leaves down a long river. Another requires Cyprien to work his way through an underground termite maze, while a further area requires the young orphan to float up the center of a large tree collecting glow bugs and reaching the top by negotiating rising air currents.
Evil Twin may be pretty as a picture but much of the build up is demolished by some awful camera work. We’ve seen most 3D platform characters go through the motion of not quite getting it right (Croc, Spyro, etc.) but by the third attempt there is usually no looking back (pun intended). Sadly, Evil Twin doesn’t even make ‘mark one’. It’s all very well leaving the entire direction up to the player (shoulder buttons to swing camera left or right), but there must be some intelligence written into the code to avoid way to many visual problems. You know the routine… jump, realign camera… jump, realign camera… but on far too many occasions I couldn’t even see young Cyprien on the screen to line him up for the next hurdle. In fact at one point he was catapulted high into the upper reaches of a level but the camera failed to follow suit. This left only one course of action… a kamikaze leap into the unknown and yet another valuable life was lost.
OUR PLEDGE: We promise that we have fully played 'Evil Twin - Cyprien’s Chronicles' before writing this review. The scores given above are our honest opinion and were not influenced in any way by the manufacturer or distributor of the game.
This review was written by Martin © Absolute PlayStation
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