Ethan: Meteor Hunter (PS Vita) Review by Jason Bonnar

Fundy Haziran 04, 2022

Ethan: Meteor Hunter (PS Vita)

Ethan: Meteor Hunter is a side scrolling action puzzle platform game available for download from the PlayStation Store for the PS Vita. Ethan: Meteor Hunter on PlayStation Vita is an enhanced port of the game that was released for the PS3 on October 23rd 2013 with improvements to such areas as the gameplay and controls.

The story sees a meteor crashing nearby to where the lead character Ethan is standing, which provides him with superpowers, such as telekinesis to freeze time and move objects. Ethan is a rat whose home was destroyed by his neighbour, which has caused Ethan to want to look for more meteorites within his surroundings to gain even more power to enable him to exact revenge on his neighbour.

There are over fifty levels spread across three unique worlds that include hazards, objects and obstacles that you will have to overcome in order to progress beyond a variety of puzzles. The level design provides a lot of variation between the levels in regards to how one level you will be trying to figure out puzzles, while the next could see you bouncing on a pogo stick in an attempt to ascend the entire level, another area of a level could see you piloting a ship with a weapon attached to it and other levels even have an onslaught of enemies attacking Ethan on a regular basis and a boss battle.

There are three sets of challenges including: time, pauses used and fragments collected. The time challenge sees you attempting to complete each level as quickly as possible, while the pauses challenge sees you attempting to complete each level with the least possible amount of pauses used in order to navigate your way around platforms that are a little too high for you to reach with your jump or obstacles and hazards, alongside the fragments challenge, which sees you attempting to collect all of the fragments of meteor rocks that you can find in each level.

As the levels can be solved in multiple ways; it means that there is more freedom to approach the puzzles in different ways as it results in you thinking for a moment and analysing your surrounding environments to assess each puzzle before proceeding in an attempt to find your way through puzzles that would otherwise require the telekinesis power to move objects, which makes it even more supremely rewarding when you find an alternative method of solving a puzzle that does not require the use of the telekinesis power to pause the game and in finding the alternative approach to the puzzle; you have improved your performance in the pauses challenge for completing levels with the least possible amount of pauses.

The character design of the lead character Ethan is rather interesting as Ethan is a rat and yet is somehow strangely reminiscent of Ratchet from the Ratchet and Clank franchise, but is certainly no carbon copy of Ratchet’s character design as Ethan still has enough distinct features and charm to be a lead character in his own right, although the lack of a voice somewhat suppress the personality of the lead character.

Ethan: Meteor Hunter supports cross-buy between the PS3 and Vita, although it unfortunately does not support cross-save, so you will not be able to continue from your previous progression on the PS3 version when playing the Vita version and vice versa. Cross-buy presents a superb amount of value as it means that you will be purchasing both the PS3 and Vita versions of the game with just a single purchase.

The controls are well mapped to the Vita with a control scheme comprising of face buttons and the touch screen. The control scheme consists of pressing X to jump or to fire a weapon; pressing square to pause the game with Ethan’s telekinetic powers; pressing O to return to the previous checkpoint after having failed in your attempt to solve a puzzle; pressing R to grab an object; holding R while moving the left analogue stick to the right or pressing right on the d-pad to push an object; holding R while

moving the left analogue stick to the left or pressing left on the d-pad to pull an object; pressing L to rotate the positioning of an object or alternatively changing the direction of the right analogue stick; changing the direction of the left analogue stick or pressing up, left or right on the d-pad to move Ethan; holding the left analogue stick downwards or pressing down on the d-pad to increase Ethan’s momentum as he slides down a slope; and pressing start to display the pause menu. The touch screen provides an alternative to pressing R by tapping the touch screen to grab an object and the rear touch pad provides an alternative to pressing L or changing the direction of the right analogue stick by moving your finger along the rear touch pad to rotate the positioning of an object.

The graphics are pretty good as they are colourful and vibrant throughout that lends a certain charm to them that really adds to the game. The lead character; the backdrops to the environments; the hazards, objects and obstacles; enemies; and much more besides all look great in their own cartoon orientated approach.

The presentation of the game is solid with a great touch screen based user interface across various menus such as the main menu, level selection menu, online leaderboards, help and options menu, how to play menu and various gameplay menus with support for navigation via the left analogue stick, directional pad and face buttons, although it does not include support for navigation via the right analogue stick and rear touch pad, although that is not an issue considering the other methods of navigation that are available. The background of the menu screens consists of meteors moving quickly through the sky amongst the stars and rock formations along the ground, while the Ethan: Meteor Hunter logo is at the top centre of the screen.

The audio consists of sound effects and music with the sound effects mostly comprising of the lead character jumping, sliding along a slope, bouncing on a pogo stick and firing weapons on a ship that you get to pilot in particular levels with hazards, such as drills mashing together, pools of acid that bubbles when Ethan accidentally jumps into it and a variety of sounds produced by enemies, alongside incidental sounds, such as collecting pause icons for the use of Ethan’s telekinetic powers, collecting meteor fragments, the spring of the bouncy boards, crumbling platforms and the sound of returning to the previous checkpoint. The only negative regarding the audio is that there are no voice-overs resulting in less personality from the lead character, while the music is purely instrumental spread across a fusion of genres.

The trophy list includes twelve trophies with seven bronze trophies, four silver trophies and one gold trophy. The easiest trophy has to be the Broken Arm bronze trophy for dying ten times in the same level, while the Speedy bronze trophy for moving at 88 miles per hour is a possibility on the first slope of the first level providing that you appropriately time your movement along the slope to gain the maximum momentum and speed. There are also a couple of accumulative trophies that will naturally be earned as you progress through the game, such as the More Still More bronze trophy for collecting a total of 1,000 fragments; the Nearly There bronze trophy for spending a total of sixty minutes in pause mode as you use your telekinetic powers, while there are three bronze trophies for completing all of the levels within each of the three worlds. The hardest trophies include the Just in Time silver trophy for completing the time challenges across all of the levels; the Eureka silver trophy for completing the pause challenges across all of the levels; the Meteor Hunter silver trophy for completing the fragment challenges across all of the levels; and Who’s the Boss gold trophy for completing all three sets of challenges across all of the levels. I would estimate depending upon skill and a good trophy guide to provide some helpful tips that it would take around ten hours to 100% the trophy list.

There are no difficulty levels, but as you progress through the levels you will find that there are more obstacles and hazards to overcome by precisely timing your jumps or movement and more platforms that you cannot reach with the height of your normal jump resulting in you having to jump, use one of the pauses that you had previously collected, positioning a platform with your telekinetic powers and quickly jumping off the platform to progress onto the next area of the level, therefore naturally producing some rather difficult puzzles.

There is no local or online multiplayer component, while that does not reduce the quality of the gameplay; it would have been great to see some form of co-operative multiplayer, such as two of the Ethan character having to synchronise their telekinetic powers in perfect harmony in order to manoeuvre beyond puzzles, although there are online leaderboards.

The online leaderboards focuses on the global scores, your scores and your friends scores across each of the levels and the three game modes with each leaderboard containing each player’s rank; name (PSN ID); each player’s best score or time within that particular level and game mode with the positioning of each player based upon their best score.

The replayability of Ethan: Meteor Hunter stems from the three sets of challenges across the time based, pauses used and fragments collected challenges, alongside the competitive online leaderboards that provides further motivation to attempt to improve your performance for each of the three sets of challenges, therefore supplying plenty of reasons to return to each and every level.

Overall, Ethan: Meteor Hunter is a great, fun side scrolling platformer that should be enjoyed by anyone who is a fan of the genre as it possesses enough originality in the approach to its puzzles to be worthy of a purchase, especially at such great value as £7.99 for the Vita and PS3 versions via a cross-buy purchase.

Jason Bonnar

8.5 out of 10

Analysis