A Gun with One Bullet

The One Shot, One Kill aspect of sniping has been a mainstay within video games for some time, dominating the hyped expectations of First Person Shooters.  But OSOK is not just a medal to be awarded on a flick in a multiplayer lobby here: the one bullet in your gun is your one opportunity to slay all your enemies in front of you.  You must kill them all in order to maintain your secrecy and continue your mission.  But how do you kill multiple people in different places with one bullet fast enough to avoid alerts?  Telepathy.  Telepathy and a lot of Hate.

You are THE GIRL, fighting a past plagued with atrocities and trauma inflicted by THE CULT that she joined and was raised in. She is out to kill THE LEADER, a mysterious long haired aviator-donning man who set THE GIRL on her path to vengeance.  The plot of Children of the Sun is offered in sample sized, overly-saturated, schizophrenically-paced retraces that take the syrupy feel and transitions of a Killer7 and inject the 4-day-bender concoction Post Void would leave you to deal with.  It’s hard to piece everything together but the reasons to kill these cultists are not needed when you’re given your ways to dispatch them.

Wielding otherworldly powers, THE GIRL uses her trusty sniper with one bullet, and when your initial bullet hits your first target with a Sniper Elite-like onboard camera from firing to contact, you’re brought into a first person view of the bullet and can send that bullet wherever you see fit.  This allows for impossible angles to become routine and no cultist to feel safe as each enemy will bleed soon enough.  All shots must connect with either an enemy or an environmental hazard, explosive or aviary, or the mission must be restarted.  The angles you’ll be expected to hit are going to feel absolutely nutty at first but the end result within the game’s 2-3 hour campaign will stretch how far one bullet should be able to go.

Preparation is the name of the game.  Movement and firing is handled exclusively on your mouse, no keyboard needed.  Guiding your mouse left and right will navigate THE GIRL around the layout on another Killer7-esque railed path to gain different angles.  Once enemies are in sight, you can mark targets that will show different colors for different types of enemies which will be highly necessary to map your kill path based on who needs what and where.  It’s a very simple control scheme that feels smooth and effective even with juggling multiple different aspects of combat in the later levels.

As you get the hang of guiding your bullet through multiple people, a steady stream of extra abilities become available.  Guiding your bullet mid-flight, accelerating your bullet to supersonic speeds, changing your bullet’s trajectory mid-flight without hitting a target: the creativity and collective bullshit you can perform with these inclusions makes the initial entrance of a level feel like an insurmountable task and by the end of it you wonder how these cultists ever stood a chance against your genius.  The overexposed neon red of the blood splatter, whipping your bullet 180 degrees to the next cultist running in fear of the projectile with a mind of its own setting its eyes on them, and completing your mission with a cacophony of noise, colors, and dopamine is more addictive than whatever this cult was providing.

And you’ll need each and every inch of power you bring to your bullet as the cultists did not come to lie down for you.  The beginning missions offer a pedestrian outlook of the farther reaches of THE CULT, but later levels bring in riot-shield wielding enemies, heavy armor soldiers that require a supersonic bullet to kill, and praying shamans that can curve your bullet out of harm’s way, only to be vulnerable for a short period of time.  Each layer provided to your arsenal is another layer THE CULT recognizes and defends against, and starts really stretching your brain for the best possible outcome to murderous victory.

Throughout Children of the Sun’s 26 levels, 21 level-specific optional objectives help push the envelope of what’s doable within each area.  These (to my knowledge) aren’t necessary for any post-credit extras but they are worth a good chunk of points as each level, outside the mini-game and plot-specific levels, is scored based on time, amount of shots/paths taken, limb damage, multikills, and more.  The scoring gives a much needed injection of replayability for the competitive bunch as the amount of meat on the bones for its campaign might not be enough to satisfy some.

There are a few levels in between the puzzle-based shooting that serve as breaks in the action. Most are plot related points that help provide a needed reset from the tense action, but there’s this one 2D minigame where you have to collect bullets on a rudimentary map before you can hit these roaming targets. There’s walls in the way, you are constantly moving, can only turn in wide rotations, and if you hit a wall it reverses and mirrors your direction.  This minigame is miserable and half broken: you and your enemies can go through walls, the patterns for the enemies leave very little wiggle room, and it’s just not a very fun sidestep from the game’s main attraction.

Most levels are very well done, and the car chase mission stands out as ludicrously entertaining, but the very last level of Children of the Sun feels like an ankle-snapping misstep.  With all the different enemies seen throughout the game and all the different abilities provided to your bullet, The Temple requires you to remove two tiers of several enemies of multiple calibers and there’s less creativity to muster through this than there has been prior. It succumbs to hitting “the line” and praying your angles are correct.  It took me nearly an hour (and a night away to vent frustrations) to map and hit the correct path for this level, which was nearly a third of my total playtime.  I get that they wanted this grand finale, but it doesn’t provoke the vivid imagination the previous levels did and provided more of a sigh of relief that it was over than the dopamine-soaked “A-ha!” moments peppered through beating everything up until that point.

You know what a sign of a good game is?  After finally finishing the last level, I wanted to go back and pull my scores higher, as well as hit the rest of the optional objectives, because that rush of pulling some serious shenanigans on dirty cultists with a big ole sniper bullet and some revenge-filled ingenuity is a rip-roarin’ way to burn a couple hours.  With its syrupy, saturated presentation and some real smart puzzle gunplay, it’s easy to angle our bullet past Children of the Sun’s misfires to combo for a few hours of pure delight.

8/10