Europe Review

Let’s face it: the Earth is doomed and we should start looking for a modern home. According to NASA, the best place to find an environment suitable for life in our solar system is Jupiter’s moon Europa. I can confirm: I spent a few hours there and saw lovely blue skies, lush green trees and lots of cute animals. And while I didn’t see those huge saltwater oceans that NASA predicts, I did find plenty of jumping puzzles.

Jumping is just one of the things you can do in the puzzle platformer Europa: you can also climb, levitate and glide, and the combination of all these movement skills means that when you jump off the ground, you might as well launch yourself off a cliff. Jump, levitate to gain even greater heights, then sail through the ages. It’s a freedom of movement that you can’t find in many games.

So it’s a shame that in a game so heavily based on movement, Europe doesn’t handle everything very well. Worse yet, in a world primed for exploration, there isn’t much to find. The controls in Europe are a little too sloppy and mushy to really enjoy all the jumping and gliding, and the world, while lovely, never lives up to its appearance.

Glide path

In Europa, you are a little kid named Zee who discovers a mysterious moon and pieces together the pages of her dad’s diary. According to your dad, the Earthlings managed to colonize and terraform Europe, but something went terribly wrong: a war began between the human colonists and the automatons called gardeners.

With foxes, wild boars, and deer grazing peacefully in the meadows as Jupiter hovers in the sky above, vigilant sentinel robots patrol the world, eager to keep you at bay.

Europa is divided into chapters, each giving you a slice of the world with puzzles to solve, often involving giant floating blocks or switches that open doors to the next zone. The cozy atmosphere of the Studio Ghibli-inspired world extends to the puzzles: they’re all fairly basic jumping or gliding activities that are never complicated enough to be frustrating, but neither are they particularly satisfying to solve.

The main problem is Zee himself: his jumps are arduous to keep precise, and the third-person camera requires almost constant adjustments. Even with plenty of practice over the three hours it took to complete the game, I rarely felt like I was moving smoothly. Zee sometimes grabs onto things like shelves when I don’t want him to, and often habit grab things like moving stone balls when I need them.

There are some great levels in Europe, mostly once you put aside the jumping puzzles and you can glide around the world like a bird. Some levels are filled with energy nodes called Zephyr, which Zee can store in a tank on his back, allowing him to float straight up for a few seconds. It can be stimulating to glide around the map, dive down to refill your Zephyr, and then fly back up into the sky without ever touching the ground. But there are also entire levels where you’re forced to play without Zephyr, and the sluggishness of Zee’s controls quickly becomes annoying again.

In addition to puzzles, Zee also has to face guards. Certain enemy types work great in Europe: flying alien creatures swarm around, destroying Zephyr tanks if they touch you, making gliding an exhilarating challenge as you tilt and twist to avoid them.

Less fun are the enemies that constantly bombard you with energy blasts in the second half of the game. Zee cannot be killed, but when you are knocked down by a blast, it takes a few seconds of tardy, “stunned” movement to recover, which is exactly the same amount of time it takes the enemy to prepare for another blast. If you get hit once, you’ll usually have to take another four or five shots before you can crouch for cover. This brutal bombardment seems out of place in Europe: there is nothing pleasant about being kicked repeatedly when you are down.

It’s challenging for me to call Europa an exploration game because there isn’t much to explore beyond hunting for one type of collectible – and they’re not particularly well hidden. When I tried to deviate from the path to the exit, I was almost always met with resistance.

There aren’t many walls in Europe, but when you reach the edge of the playing area, a powerful wind will pick you up and push you back onto the pitch. This happened often as I climbed hills, scaled cliffs, and glided, not because I was solving puzzles, but because I wanted to see what else was out there. As I explored, I usually found nothing but powerful winds that pushed me back onto my linear course.

Europa is nice to look at, and there’s a well-told story that becomes more and more engaging over the course of about three hours of play, but I never really felt like I was exploring a mysterious moon, following a narrow path to the next stage. The occasional thrilling sequence where you dive and dive around the world is really great, but too often I found myself struggling with the controls rather than getting carried away.