The cheap licensing fees and low cost of producing compact discs allowed developers a lot of room to get creative on the original Sony Playstation console with little to no risk. It was a very experimental time for game development as we saw unique concepts and genre bending the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the early days of the medium. Tail of the Sun is one of the more unique releases from this period. I recall reading a review for it in Electronic Gaming Monthly. The single screenshot they provided made it difficult to tell exactly what the game looked like, but the descriptions of it piqued my interest something fierce. Unfortunately I missed out on it, but I’ve always wondered how the game plays and if I would even like it or not. I was finally able to track down this limited release, and I’m sad to say that it didn’t live up to my expectations.
In Tail of the Sun you play as a caveman (or woman) in prehistoric times. Your goal in this 3D adventure game is to make your tribe prosper by defeating animals and collecting their meat and eventually to stack mammoth tusks so that you can climb your way to the sun. You can choose between three different cavemen, and what’s interesting is they have a set life-span (indicated by flames at the top of the screen). This is basically an open-world game from an era before they were popular. You can basically go anywhere right from the start, and the world is absolutely huge by system standards. It features grassy plains, forests, mountains and oceans.
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| It can be pretty difficult to tell what’s going on sometimes. |
Unfortunately the scenery is a little bit sparse. The forests are hardly dense with just a few trees here and there. The oceans are just water with very little fish and other wildlife. The grassy plains are extremely boring and all areas look too similar if you ask me. The world is huge, but what’s the point when it’s so barren and boring? Gameplay options are pretty limited. You’re encouraged to explore in order to find food which increases your stats. Instead of being given numbers as indicators your abilities are measured by a diagram showing various parts of your caveman’s body. The color which fills in your head, legs, arms, etc. shows how strong these body parts are. You increase the strength by eating foods which affect different areas. Basically this means you’ll spend most of the game running around like a chicken without a head. Tail of the Sun feels aimless, and while the emphasis on exploration is a nice change of pace the world is so empty and lifeless.
Combat is a joke here. While you do get new technology later on (giving you weapons) you start out with only your bare caveman fists. The problem with this is that, rather than a punch, your character tries some half-effort haymaker that’s clunky and has terrible reach. In the beginning it’s tough to kill anything to get any sort of meat to bring back to the tribe; I found myself being killed by simple birds and fish in the beginning. With some practice I was finally able to defeat the most elementary of animals, but it took some real time before I was able to take down some serious game. If there’s one thing Tail of the Sun does right it’s the feeling of progression. You are rewarded for the amount of time you spend here, and your caveman avatar clearly becomes stronger as you play.
Speaking of clunky just about every action in the game is a chore because the controls and physics are so darn unpolished. To run you hold down the square button but your caveman acts as if he’s moving across ice. He has to build up momentum to run and then slides all over the place when you stop. Additionally, walking on sloped terrain is a nightmare. Rather than keeping their posture upright the cavemen you control tend to stand outward at an angle basically defying the laws of physics. This also means that when they jump, instead of jumping upwards, they bounce in the direction they’re standing. This leads to some rather disorienting gameplay. Tail of the Sun’s worst offense however is the fact that your caveman suffers from narcolepsy. He or she falls asleep almost at random and constantly. This even happens in the middle of a fight which is terribly inconvenient. This entire mechanic should have been removed because it’s an annoying hindrance.
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| A pretty game this most certainly is not. |
Tails of the Sun looks like something you would expect to see on the 3DO. That’s not a compliment. The graphics are pretty bad; textures are heavily pixelated, the scenery is bland and sparse, character models are blocky and lack detail. The animals are easily the worst looking things in this game. Some lack textures and with the sparse amount of polygons used in them it can actually be tough to tell exactly what the models are supposed to be. Yes, it’s really that bad. The cherry on top is the awful framerate that hovers somewhere between fifteen to twenty frames per second even with nothing on-screen. It’s ridiculous that, with such sparse scenery, the developers couldn’t get this game to run better on hardware we all know is capable of handling much more. At least the transitions from night to day and vice versa are kind of nice. If there’s one highlight to this game it’s clearly the soundtrack. It’s best described as ‘caveman electronica.’ I was really into the prehistoric rave thing it has going on. The music is incredibly original and really good to boot.
Tail of the Sun gets points for originality, but that’s just about all it has going for it. There are few games I’ve played where I’ve ran around so aimlessly, accomplished so little, and was bored the entire time. The developers just didn’t have a clear enough picture of what they wanted to do here leading to an extremely unfocused package. I’m sure there is someone out there that will appreciate this one as an ‘artsy’ video game, but that person sure as heck isn’t me.
