Children of the Sun Review: Bend It Like Beckham…With a Bullet

Most games only get one shot to make an impression, and because René Rother’s Children of the Sun, a stylish hybrid shooter and puzzle game, is built around a single shot, it really makes the most of that chance. The nameless, masked protagonist has only one bullet per level, but she uses it so deftly, telekinetically guiding it through the air, that it’s all she or the game needs. That’s ultimately for the best, since any sort of plot beyond glimpses of the evil cult leader you’re seeking revenge against would unnecessarily jam up the barrel.

That’s not to say that this is a thoughtless game. You can’t just point and shoot, and the first half of every level is spent circling your targets, trying to pick out and tag the yellow-clad cultists among the darkly hued environments, as if you’re playing the world’s most morbid version of Where’s Waldo? Once that’s done, you have to figure out how to make a bloody daisy chain of victims as you redirect the bullet from corpse to corpse, later gaining the abilities to slow down and bend the bullet, Wanted-style, around corners, to accelerate fast enough to puncture armor, or to propel the bullet (as if you’re re-firing it) in a new direction. It’s only fitting, then, that each level ends with a top-down map of your physics-defying trajectory, underlining the fact that the ability to take out 14 different targets at once very much puts the art in arterial spray.

The double-edged sword of Children of the Sun comes from its efforts to increase in difficulty. Its first two-thirds mostly accomplish this through the environment, which grows more fortified as you move from the forest campsites through single-story cabins and ultimately to the main cult compound. These set pieces cleverly force you to find new angles from which to zig-zag your bullet, whether that’s hopping an extra bounce off a drifting car’s fuel tank, timing a shot through moving train cars, or peeking behind curtains to best pop in and out of motel rooms.

The game’s final act, though, introduces rival psychics that can temporarily redirect bullets that pass within their sphere of influence. At this point, Children of the Sun loses some of its precision, becoming less like sniper chess and more like sniper backgammon, with careful play susceptible to a bad roll of the dice. The game is also at its most dully mechanical here, fixated more on the execution of the controls than on the execution of the target.

This is all the more frustrating given that these last levels are also the longest, and given the whole one-shot gimmick, a single mistake at the end of a 16-kill streak can send you back to the start of the level. That said, unless you’re aiming for a top spot on the front-and-center score leaderboard or trying to suss out some of the more cryptic bonus objectives for each level (“Most can burn, but inside they can’t”), Children of the Sun is fairly forgiving. Even with a healthy amount of trial and error and failure, its 20-odd levels can be beaten in under five hours.

Beyond its prolonged final third and iffy difficulty scaling, Children of the Sun isn’t done any favors by its dialogue, which is too gauche (“I just killed a man, now I’m horny”) or too sappy (“Soon the sun will start shining through a bullet-shaped hole in your head”) by half. But it soars whenever you’re planning an action that’s brought explosively to fruition, and luckily that’s the order of the day here. And as you marvel at this self-assuredly suave bullet-play, it’s easy to imagine Suda Gôichi out there taking notes on what Rother has accomplished.

This game was reviewed with code purchased by the reviewer.