Review: The Third Birthday

The Third Birthday is a third-person cover based shooter for the PlayStation Portable. It was developed by HexaDrive. It is a sequel to the PlayStation game Parasite Eve II, which came out in 1999.

Aya Brea and a solider fighting off the Twisted.

The world has been overrun by monstrous creatures known as the Twisted, and only amnesic Counter Twisted Investigation member Aya Brea can stop them. Aya has an ability, dubbed OverDive, to leap into people’s bodies in the past, and use them to rewrite history. With the help of her fellow CTI members, Aya must change past events so the Twisted never progress to the point of completely destroying the world, and discover what made her amnesic.

In The Third Birthday, you leap into soldiers in the past to fight the Twisted. The game is six missions long, with each mission made up of several rooms your travel through until you reach the boss at the end of the mission.

When you dive into someone you get whatever weapon they are holding, plus the three weapons you brought with you, and grenades.

Levels are designed like arenas: several soldiers including you hide behind walls in an open area and pick off the Twisted until they are all dead, then you can move onto the next area. The idea is that using the walls and multiple soldiers, you dive around the area, trying to get around the Twisted’s defense by outflanking them and wearing down their health, since Aya’s weapons are stronger than the soldiers.

Aya has a few other tricks: if you damage a Twisted enough you can dive into them and take a huge chunk off their life bar, if you focus on one Twisted for a long time without shooting you can command the soldiers to fire on that one all at once, and if simply you fire enough times you fill up another bar that makes Aya invincible for a while and makes her shots extra powerful.

The triangle means Aya can dive into and damage it.

You can buy new weapons and upgrade current weapons in rest areas between rooms and before a mission.

While the “diving into multiple soldiers in a fight” sounds like a fun idea, in reality it is implemented poorly and the fighting in general falls short on several parts. Soldiers are pretty much useless, as are the walls. Soldiers you are not controlling will just stand there, shooting at the Twisted until they are killed, doing no damage in the meantime. The walls provide no protection because the Twisted can fly around them and attack you from behind, or smash them.

Most of Aya’s weapons become useless halfway through the game when stronger enemies are introduced. Even upgrading them does nothing. All that works are grenades and sniper rifles, and there is never enough ammo lying around for Aya to use.

What all this means is that you will spend the latter half of the game leaping into the one soldier in the room with a grenade launcher or a sniper rifle, and firing it at the giant Twisted annihilating all the other soldiers until you run out of ammo. Then you dive from soldier to soldier, pointlessly shooting at the near-invincible Twisted in the hope you might be able to stun it until the next soldier with a grenade launcher appears and you dive into them. It is really repetitive, and a lot of the time winning feels dependent on luck and remembering to bring a grenade launcher.

Bosses can take forever to finish off too.

The game would be tolerable though, since combat is not actually that difficult as long as you do not care about getting a high score, if it was not backed by a terrible story. There are so many problems with it, as one would expect from a story with time travel that was not thought out well.

It is never explained well why whatever Aya is doing to the past is good for the present, like destroying a nest of Twisted at a club or Grand Central station, and from the looks of things it never does appear to be an improvement. The story is inconsistent on whether or not people in the past can see Aya when she leaps into people, how much authority the CTI has compared to the army, and whether other members of the CTI remember what happened before time was changed. Later on the plot gets more confusing, there are a couple of backstabs that are not explained well, and the big reveal about the Twisted is unbelievably confusing and settled anticlimactically.

Aya herself is rather unlikable character. She spends most of the game as a quiet, submissive, personality-free girl who runs around, gasps literally every other second, and has half-finished melodramatic monologues about who is she. She gets better in the last third of the game for some unexplained reason, but by then most scenes are focused on pushing the convoluted plot forward. The rest of the cast exist only to state the obvious and offer bad advice.

There's a face that screams "Exciting action heroine".

Anyone who was waiting for a Parasite Eve sequel is going to be disappointed. Ties to the previous games are tenuous, and the few returning characters act out-of-character. Mitochondria are not mentioned once. HexaDrive should have made an original game instead of dragging the Parasite Eve license down like this.

While the travelling into past people is a cool idea, it is wasted in The Third Birthday. Newcomers to the series and old fans alike should avoid this game.