Body Harvest Review

Playing DMA Design's Body Harvest is like taking the lead role in a BBC sci-fi TV series. The visuals may not be revolutionary, and the story may be a bit cheesy, but there's something unmistakably charming about the whole thing.

Anyway, analogy aside, you're a super-soldier who's traveled back in time to put down the initial invading forces of an alien race that's ravaged your era's earth. This plays out into a game that's not easy to describe, save for the fact that it has a few graphical and gameplay similarities to Rare's Blast Corps. You move about a variety of terrain piloting your little soldier man or sitting behind the controls of cars, tanks, planes, boats, and the like. Crucial points of gameplay are reached when a harvesting force of aliens takes on a nearby town. You then have to locate and destroy them before they gobble up six humans, which would produce a nigh-invulnerable mutant alien (that's a very bad thing). Encounters with smaller forces are frequent and pepper the parts of the game where you have to solve minor puzzles in order to move along.

From within the gameplay, Body Harvest is not much like anything else, actually. It's a slower-paced title, but not to the point of being boring. Its originality is refreshing (being able to flip from walking to manning a tank to flying a plane is pretty nice). The graphics are pretty bland at times, as one might expect from a much-delayed first-generation N64 game, and the lack of a look function dates it, but neither of these elements really gets in the way. The soundtrack, while limited and too often repeated, is atmospheric in an X-Files theme song sort of way.

Where some elements of the game teeter on the edge of slightly above average, pushing well above the median there's a good chunk of value to Body Harvest, as each stage is pretty big and requires a lot of work to beat. On the downside of that upside, the game only allows you to save once a major task is accomplished. This means that you may have played a certain section for an hour, made a wrong turn, ended up in a lake, drowned, and had to restart the stage. Or it might so happen that you play for an hour, get thrashed by a boss character, and have to start over again. And so on. Consider yourself warned: This sort of scenario can happen frequently (a happenstance that robbed the score of at least a point for the reviewer's tilt).

For gamers looking for something almost completely unique or even just a big, dumb game to fill the void before Zelda comes out, Body Harvest fits the bill nicely.