The concept of playing a game with absolutely no confrontations and violence might seem foreign to many videogame fans. Killing and being victorious over your opponent always seems to be the goal of just about 90% of all games. Luckily for us, the 10% left sometimes turn out to be amazing. That's the case for Ninja Bee's A World of Keflings.I already made a case about how much I love that game a while back, when it was released as part of the Summer of Arcade promotion that Microsoft likes to make during U.S summertime. It's an absolute blast putting together your own towns and not have to worry about anyone coming around to demolish it. It was truly a "busy busy bee" game.
So it comes as no surprise that we're getting to play a set of DLC for that game, a little more than a year after its release. It Came From Space features a whole new set of blueprints to build, a new environment to pluck resources from and a handful of crazy characters to laugh at. As the name suggests, this DLC is centered on aliens. They crashed on the Kefling world and lo and behold, it's up to you (mainly, your Xbox Live avatar) to help them get back home.
Luckily for your E.T friends, all of the materials they need happen to have come along with their ship. You'll get things going by putting some of them to work and harvesting the base items like bars of radioactive materials, wood and clay but soon enough, just like in the original game, you're steered towards turning these into more specialized materials.
The gameplay structure It Came From Outer Space follows is right on with what we saw in 'Keflings. Those base materials are harvested into a single building at first and from there, you expand and build new structures as objectives are met and blueprints are learned. This time around, though, there's a catch. Some of these buildings are living beings and can be mutated into other types of structures. This might sound pretty complicated, but it's really not. You basically build the core structure and feed it a carrot filled with alien mutagen. Mutated buildings can then produce other types of much needed raw materials.
Another new type of unit introduced in this DLC is the robotic minion, which already starts out at high levels on just about every job you could put him to. And you'll need to put him to work right away since he's the only one capable of handling the nuclear materials and junk parts required by your schematics.
As you might have picked up by looking at these screenshots, there's only one environment to play in It Came From Outer Space. It's relatively smaller than the usual A World of Keflings stage and takes about as long to play through as well. You're likely to take around 2 hours to complete all the objectives and get every achievement, but there are incentives to keep building even after the story is done.
There are plenty of good reasons to pick this new DLC pack up. It's charming to no end, brimming with the sort of personality we've seen in previous Ninja Bee games and the pokes at science fiction tropes are hilarious. The writing is quick and witty and just like A World of Keflings, it's very reverential to pop culture and loves to make fun (in a fun way) of the tenets of videogames. It Came From Space is a great excuse to pop A World of Keflings back in, no probes abo...er... doubt about it! |8
