Left Behind: Eternal Forces is full of lols and facepalming

[strannik01]

Several years ago, I wrote about Left Behind: Eternal Forces, the then-new video game based on the Left Behind franchise. For those who don't know, the game involves the Evangelical Tribulation Force fighting against the Peacekeeper forces of the Antichrist. At the time, I downloaded a demo of the game with an intention to play it to see if the game was half as hilariously insane as the website made it seem.

The first time I tried it, the game crashed my computer. I didn't try again. And when I got a new computer, I transferred the demo over but never bothered to install in.

Then, a few days ago, I was looking over some of my saved installation files and I decided to try to install the demo just for the heck of it. And, surprisingly enough, it worked.

The game turned out to be at once hilarious and facepalm-worthy. There were so, so many things to comment on. I dearly wished I could comment on it live on Twitter. But, since that wouldn't work, I decided to do the next thing and compile the list of my thoughts and impressions of the game as I progressed.

• The game opens with a montage that, along with other things, divides humanity into "those who seek close relationship with God," those who reject God and those who believe but don't seek closeness and those who don't believe. The last two are in the same category. In other words, the videogame pretty much equates every Christian denomination that isn't Evangelical with atheists - which, suffice to say, does a disservice to everyone involved.
• The tutorial manages to be at once useful and useless. It is useful in teaching you how to, say, move around, change camera angles and use abilities, but it leaves out some important things, like how to upgrade units and acquire resources. That last one is crippling, since two of the four missions offered in the demo depend on you being able to, oh yeah - UPGRADE UNITS AND ACQUIRE RESOURCES.
• You start out with a Disciple unit that's charge with "recruiting" civilians who wonder around the game's version of New York City. I put "recruit" in quotations because it basically turns every civilian unit you recruit into Ned Flanders (Maude Flanders if the unit is female). Because, while there is some variation among civilian models, the "friend" units are completely identical. If you have more than one recruiter, you can turn an entire street intersection worth of pedestrians into a crowd of Ned Flanderses in five minutes. Tell me that's not unsettling.
• That said, you can't "recruit" more than one unit at once. If you move your Disciple away from the unit mid-recruitment, or try to recruit someone else mid-recruitment, the civilian unit you were recruiting wanders off. Some interesting parallels to real-life proselytizing there - or, at least, how the makers of the game perceive real-life proselytizing.
• "Recruiting" civilians is important, since you can't make units from scratch. Once you turn civilian units into "friends," you can make them into more specialized units - builders, soldiers, medics, etc.
• However, not all units are created equal. Both female and male Friend units can, for example, be medics, but only male Friends can be turned into soldiers and builders. Oh, and female medics look like 1950s nurses while male medics look modern... Yeah
• While your Disciple can "recruit" civilians, you can't do the same for gang members that occupy some sections of the map. The game tells you early on to avoid gang-infested sections and if you do go there, the gang members will chase you and stab you to death. And whereas in other games, if run far enough, the enemy units will stop pursuing you, the gang units WILL NOT STOP until you are dead. I find it troubling on many levels. First of all, I find it odd that you can't "recruit" gang members, but you can recruit a child kidnapper and would-be terrorist. Second of all, this goes back to what I said earlier about what the makers of the game think proselytizing is supposed to be like. It doesn't mind you preaching to civilians, but once you try to put yourself into actual danger... As Fred Clark of the Slacktivist blog pointed out in his many deconstructions of Left Behind novels, such attitude is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. Jesus preached to everyone, including sections of society the larger society considers undesirable. Sure, there is something to be said about avoiding getting murdered, but, again - the game lets you convert people with some pretty dubious history already. And, finally, I should point out that while civilians are all white, the gangsters are... ambiguously brown. Yeah...
• On a related tangent, every unit - even neutral ones - have detailed bios. You can read them by clicking "see life story" button. Problem is, there isn't really that much variety when it comes to units, so those bios might as well be assigned at random.
• The first enemy units you face are Rock musicians. Their thing is that they have the power to turn units to the Antichrist's side. If that happens, you automatically lose game. However, you can avoid succumbing to their attack by praying. And yes, every one of your units has a prayer button. So long as you keep pressing it while passing by the Rock Musicians, you will do fine.
• Alternatively, you can just sneak around them. This isn't Starcraft, where the enemy units will pounce on you the second they see you. So long as you stay approximately 12 centimeters away from them, they will ignore you.
• Speaking of which, the game encourages you to avoid violent confrontations and sneak around your enemies. Killing an enemy unit lowers your spirit points. Letting any of your units get killed is an automatic game-over. If the game mechanics and maps were better, it might have made an interesting stealth game.
• As I mentioned earlier, each unit has a bio. While sneaking around, I read the bio of one of the musician units that turned out to be a bipolar guy whom the Peacekeepers use to assassinate undesirables. Because, according to game makers, being bipolar gives you split personality. A very black and white split personality.
• The game also adamantly prevents you from entering buildings that "don't belong to you" or taking cars. If you want to use a building, you need to "acquire" it. You acquire a building by paying for it with your in-game money. You can generate currency by either ceiling off buildings or using a bank to generate money.
• Just in Starcraft, you need certain buildings to produce certain units, you need to acquire certain buildings to generate certain kinds of buildings. You also need to supply your units with food through cafes and money via banks. And, in another odd Starcraft parallel, once you "recruit" a certain number of units, you need to acquire an apartment building - until then, you can't recruit more.
• There are U.S. Army advertisements EVERYWHERE. Make of it what you will.
• For some bizarre reason, the game designers included Level 1, 2, 12 and 30 in their demo. As you imagine, this means that, once you complete Level 2, the game drops you in the middle of the plot while barely explaining what's going on and how you got there. Level 30 is even worse.
• In later levels, you get singers of your own - Christian rock singers. Their attacks turn enemy units into civilians, civilians that you can then "recruit." The opening battle went something like this - I used my singers to turn enemies civilians, converted civilians and used the church building to turn them into singers, who then went on to turn the incoming enemies into civilians... you get the idea.
• You also get to use characters from the books. Those characters get nifty powers unique to them. Bruce Barnes has the ability that boost everybody's spiritual levels and deplete enemy spiritual levels, making it easier to turn the enemies neutral. Another character has a power to clear Fog of War for a few minutes.
• Speaking of book characters, at one point, the game actually penalizes you for failing to read an article written by Cameron Williams - a journalist protagonist of the book and thinly veiled stand-in for one of the co-authors.
• During the Level 12 battle, I discovered a major weakness of the game - all the prayer/recruiting effects make it nearly impossible for me to select units individually and use their individual abilities. This isn't Starcraft, where you can see which units you selected - it just shows you the unit with the largest spiritual level of the bunch.
• Oh, and you know how I mention that Rock Musicians will ignore you if you don't get up close and personal - same thing with enemy troops. Even if they are within inches of your units, they will ignore your units unless you attack them directly. This meant that I was able to "recruit" new forces while the enemy soldiers causally strolled by.
• On similar tangent - the unit dialogue options are limited to 1-3 phrases. And, for some reason, the game designers didn't think it was necessary to have them react to injuries. When a unit in Starcraft is getting slaughtered, it damn well sounds like it's getting slaughtered. When a Disciple gets gunned down (or knifed) he continues saying that's he's happy to do God's work until he dies.
• Every time you pass a level, the game unlocks some factoid - in reality, blatant propaganda about everything from historical evidence for Biblical events to cultural issues such as abortion and evolution. All of that is accompanied by the songs from the video game soundtrack (which you are encouraged to buy).
• The game also allows any of your specialized units to create Bibles, which they can then read from. This doesn't boost their powers or anything. It just gives them Bibles. 

All and all, the game is not awful per se. The whole "don't kill anyone" thing is an interesting change of pace from the unusual games. Problem is, the game doesn't really bother to take full advantage of the premise. The navigation is awkward, the graphics are rudimentary at best. Sneaking around enemies isn't satisfying if you don't have to try very hard. For a game that is all about saving souls, most characters that aren't from the book tend to look awfully generic. The barely passable voice acting does not help. The regional and foreign accents are stereotypical as hell.  If you must play it, play it for lols because there is no way one can enjoy it as a serious game.

As for the in-game propaganda... I think it's another case of a product being made in an Evangelical bubble. The game uses the Evangelical language and addresses issues that, while relevant to Evangelical, are not nearly as relevant in the wider world. The propaganda seems to exist to affirm the beliefs of the people who are already part of the subculture rather than convince anyone.

Finally, the makers of the Left Behind: Eternal Forces are offering one of its sequels as a free download. Any of you think it would be worth it?