xbox live indie game reviews

Organon is a 3D flying/shooting game that is pretty high-gloss yet incredibly bland. If you wanted a list of the ingredients that combine to make this game, I'd say the recipe would be: 1 cup Star Wars X-Wing action, 12 oz. of the “Cube” film trilogy (minus all the gruesome booby traps), 2 tablespoons of “pew pew pew” and a metric ton of Sisyphus-inspired, “why am I doing the same thing in an infinite loop?” gameplay.

The levels are crafted inside a shiny cube-shaped environment, where innocent, 'goodie' blocks litter the world in preset patterns and spawn randomly across your path (which I assume is a purposeful attempt at making this game challenging) as you attempt to quench your insatiable block-bloodlust by exterminating those shifty, insidious 'baddie' blocks as they skip around. While the layout of the blocks varies from level to level, the overall goal and the variety of game objects (you, blocks) remains the same.

While the ostensible goal of this game is to eliminate all of the flashing red blocks (which are evil little fuckers, or so I'm told) without damaging the other peaceful blocks (stuck in a crossfire and used repeatedly as meat shields by the terrorist red blocks), you are also awarded points based on your completion time. To add to the fun, the evil blocks start to regenerate if you don't exterminate them with extreme prejudice. Luckily, your trusty radar points you towards all the targets and your lasers fire with pinpoint accuracy, so sniping the Crimson Crusaders from the far corners of the world is almost effortless. Basically, it's more efficient to just blast away any blocks that impede your path to the target than to use a friendly, surgical-strike strategy, since your time bonus more than compensates for your friendly kill penalty.

I wish there was more to say about Organon, but that really is about the gist of this game. The soundtrack is pretty futuristic and the controls are very fluid and responsive. Honestly, I think this game would serve as a pretty cool interactive screen saver or even a solid demo for the game engine. I enjoy flying shooters and love to channel my rage against various inanimate objects (like flashing red blocks, which are still fuckers), so I really want to like Organon, but the redundant action totally zaps my attention span. Before you spend your hard-earned money on this game that will wow you for about 37 seconds, here's an alternate plan: go take your cash and swing by Blockbuster- grab a copy of Cube and some Skittles and thank me later.