Review: Citizens Of Earth (Steam)

As the newly elected Vice President of the World, it’s your job to save the Earth by recruiting friends, family, and the local townsfolk! …A true politician would never get his own hands dirty, after all!

Pros:

• Cartoon graphics that evoke a strong nostalgia feeling.  I looks current but feels like a Snes game.
• Steam achievements.
• Full 360 pad support.
• RPG gameplay.
• Easy simple controls.
• Clean user friendly interface.
• Combat is turn based with a scrolling fight report.
• Retro atmosphere throughout.
• Full party management.
• Voice work is superb,  Every character have their own voice.
• Side missions galore! General theme is you must do a few side missions to unlock new characters.
• You see enemies roam the world,  Plan when to fight.
• Auto save with a save anywhere,  anytime option.
• Unlock fast travel.
• Mini games crop up especially in side missions.
• Earn experience points and level up stats and unlock new moves.
• Play at your own pace,  Do as little or as much as you like.
• Map displays locations of everything.
• Charge move,  You can attempt to auto kill enemies before a fight starts.  You don’t get as much experience.
• Humour throughout the game.
• Recruit new party members through a variety of ways.
• Particular party members change settings within the game.  You can change the time of day,  weather,  music and even the difficulty to earn more experience and loot.
• School: Here you can leave unused party members and pay to have them level up.  All done in real time,  Here is where you can keep the levels umm level and power level characters you may not use for a while.
• Combine and craft items to create more items.
• FedUPS is a service where you can order recovery items to be sent to your stash.  Again all done in real time.
• Huge areas with loads of buildings you can enter.  You have many worlds to explore all bringing new enemies and pitfalls.
• Restart fights allow you to not just restart,  But also adjust the team loadout.
• Dreamworld which… Spoiler.
• Crazy yet decent story.
• You can ambush and be ambushed for a brief buff in fights.
• Huge boss fights.
• Level up as you battle.  By this I mean you get experience as you defeat enemies meaning you actually level up in fight.  Beauty part is levelling up gives you full health.
• Secret rooms,  pick ups that can only be done by particular members.
• Earn experience by reading books from bookcases,  look at paintings and much more.
• NPC will appear in new areas as you progress through the story.

Cons:

• Music is kind of grating especially the fight music.
• Initial loading screen is all jumbled up with text on text action.
• Few screen tearing incidents.
• The map is too small and has little to no map adjustment settings like zoom for instance.
• No tutorial for explaining all the different types of statuses.
• Game crashes at random times.
• Item management is a bit broken.  You never really know if new items are equipped.
• Few issues where text doesn’t appear of it appears and disappears too quickly.
• A lot of back and forth.  When doing tasks to unlock new party members,  You can land up going back and forth several times.
• Difficulty spikes.
• Needs a better fast travel option.  You can only fast travel from set points so if you go off exploring,  There is a lot of just walking through empty screens.

In Summary,  The game does something special.  It let’s you play a game that is current in every way,  cuts out the tedious parts of a epic RPG and focuses more on action,  Yet has you having serious retro feelings.  The whole presentation is that of a Snes game.  Bright colours,  Big graphics and so playable.  It has a few issues and to be honest the novelty can wear off after a few hours but it is a hardcore RPG but simplified.  It is refreshing to see so many ways to tailor the game to your liking without any real consequence. A solid game with many hours of gameplay available and is so enjoyable that it must be in your collection.  Serious and casual RPG fans should apply!