Europa review

Let's face it: Earth is doomed and we should start looking for a new home. According to NASA, the best place to find an environment suitable for life in our solar system is Jupiter's moon Europa. Can confirm: I just spent a few hours there and I saw beautiful blue skies, lush green trees, and lots of cute animals. And while I didn't see those massive saltwater oceans NASA predicts, I did find a heck of a lot of jumping puzzles.

Jumping is just one of the things you can do in puzzle platformer Europa: you can also climb, levitate, and glide, and combining all those movement skills means when you leap off the ground you might as well be launching yourself off a cliff. Jump, levitate to gain even more altitude, then sail for ages. It's a freedom of movement not found in a lot of games.

That's why it's a shame that in a game so heavily based on movement, Europa doesn't handle all that well. To make things worse, in a world primed for exploration, there's not all that much to find. Europa's controls are a little too messy and mushy to truly enjoy all the jumping and gliding, and the world, while beautiful, never lives up to its looks.

Glidepath

In Europa you're a little kid named Zee exploring the mysterious moon while piecing together pages from your dad's journal. According to your poppa, earthlings successfully colonized and terraformed Europa but something went terribly wrong: a war began between the human colonists and automatons known as gardeners.

Along with foxes, boars, and deer peacefully grazing in the meadows as Jupiter hovers in the sky overhead, vigilant robotic guardians patrol the world, intent on keeping you out.

Europa is broken into chapters, and each gives you a chunk of the world with puzzles to solve, often involving giant hovering blocks or switches to activate that open the door to the next zone. The cozy vibe of the Studio Ghibli-inspired world extends to the puzzles: they're all pretty basic jumping or gliding activities that are never complex enough to frustrate, but also don't feel particularly satisfying to solve. 

The main issue is Zee himself: it's hard to be precise with his jumps and the third-person camera needs near-constant adjustment. Even with lots of practice over the three hours it takes to complete the game, I rarely felt like I was moving fluidly. Zee sometimes grabs onto things like ledges when I don't want him to, and often won't grab onto stuff, like pushable stone spheres, when I need him to. 

There are some great levels in Europa, mostly when the jumping puzzles are set aside and you can glide through the world like a bird. Some levels are filled with energy nodes called Zephyr that Zee can store in the tank on his back, which allows him to float straight upwards for a few seconds. Gliding across the map,  swooping down to replenish your Zephyr before rocketing back up to the sky without ever once touching the ground can be exhilarating. But there are also entire levels when you're forced to play without any Zephyr at all, and the sluggishness of Zee's controls quickly start to grate again.

Beyond puzzles, Zee also has to contend with guardians. Some enemy types work great in Europa: there are flying alien creatures that swarm around, sapping your Zephyr tanks if they touch you, making gliding an exciting challenge as you bank and swerve to avoid them. 

Less fun are the enemies who bombard you relentlessly with energy blasts in the second half of the game. Zee can't be killed, but when you're knocked down by a blast it takes several seconds of slow "dazed" movement to recover, which is exactly how much time the enemy needs to queue up another blast. Get hit once and you're usually in for another four or five blasts before you can limp to cover. This brutal bombardment feels out of tune in Europa: there's nothing cozy about being kicked repeatedly when you're down.

I have a hard time calling Europa an exploration game because there's not a whole heck of a lot of exploring to do besides hunting for a single type of collectible—and they aren't particularly well-hidden. When I did try to deviate from the path to the exit, I was almost always met with resistance. 

There aren't a lot of walls in Europa, but when you reach the edge of the playable area a strong wind will scoop you up and shove you back in-bounds. That happened a lot while I was scaling hills, climbing cliffs, and gliding around, not because I was solving puzzles but because I wanted to see what else was out there. What I found when exploring was usually nothing but the strong wind shoving me back onto my linear course.

Europa is lovely to look at, and there's a well-told story to piece together which gets more and more compelling over the course of about three hours of play, but I never really felt like I was exploring a mysterious moon, just following a narrow path to the next stage. The occasional exhilarating sequences where you swoop and dive through the world are genuinely great, but too often I was fighting the controls instead of being swept away.