Children of the Sun bills itself as a tactical third-person puzzle-shooter, but not all of those descriptors are equally relevant. Discard any attachment you have to the idea of it being a tactical third-person shooter in any traditional or meaningful way, and focus purely on the puzzle part. Children of the Sun, rather, is a supernatural sniper game where you control the path and speed of just one bullet per level – one part Hitman: Sniper Assassin, one part Seinfeld magic loogie. Essentially, you need to pause, pivot, and plot your single shot to kill every enemy on each level, all without losing said bullet beyond the boundaries of the map, or striking a part of the environment. It’s clever and compulsive, and I’ve found stitching together successful runs very satisfying. However, it definitely doesn’t elicit much sympathy for its mask-wearing main character, and I’m not sure it’s quite as replayable as it thinks it is.
The premise of Children of the Sun is simple, and it’s relayed in an equally simple fashion, with no voiceover – just quick sequences of sharp, hand-drawn artwork. That delivery is impressively effective, though. Whatever language you speak, I’d expect you’ll be able to easily follow the story.
There are occasional subtitles, but they don’t seem to contribute anything especially crucial. Our unnamed character – The Girl – is hell bent on killing her way through The Cult in order to snuff out its sadistic chief – The Leader – who murdered her parents. Also… she has paranormal powers that allow her to move things with her mind. That’s all you need to know, and that’s really all you’ll ever know. She’s upset, but her telekinetic killing spree is soothing her pain. Or making her horny. I think it’s one or the other.
It’s not that deep but, admittedly, it doesn’t need to be. It’s a revenge story, and I love revenge stories. You don’t exactly need a diving bell to get to the bottom of Death Wish, for instance. That said, it would’ve been nice for Children of the Sun to have generated a little more empathy for The Girl. She doesn’t exactly have any personality to speak of; she’s kind of just a disaffected clump of adolescent angst in a weird mask. Arguably, the solution here is just to fill in the blanks yourself but, when I do that, the most I get is someone who spent her formative years getting picked last for team sports and listening to a lot of Thirty Seconds To Mars. It’s possible I’ve just outgrown Children of the Sun’s overt edginess.
Bullet with Butterfly Wings
Outside of the teenage Tumblr tone of the main character, Children of the Sun has gone for a deliberately grainy and stylised PS2-era aesthetic. It does the job nicely, but sometimes it’s just a little too dark for its own good. I have, for instance, occasionally been forced to restart levels after striking objects I couldn’t actually see until I hit them. Enemies do glow, though. This is smart because it makes Children of the Sun less about seeking out your prey in the first place, and more about the process of putting together the perfect sequence of kill shots. This is the fun part. I would expect that needing to desperately scan for unfairly camouflaged cultists while also trying to nail a run would’ve easily ruined what Children of the Sun does right.
It certainly isn’t overwhelmed with controls or buttons; indeed, everything is performed via the left and right mouse buttons, plus the scroll wheel. It’s quite easy to pick up. The grungy, grim tone is unlikely to be to everyone’s tastes, but it’s very straightforward and approachable to otherwise play.
The Girl can strafe left or right at the beginning of each level – sometimes in a small space, sometimes circling the entire perimeter – but that’s the only navigation. 99% of Children of the Sun is spent controlling a bullet, not The Girl herself. I’ll concede her extremely limited movement does feel pretty pointless early on, but later into the roughly five-hour run time it becomes crucial to manoeuvre to the right firing angle to ensure you’ll be able to take everyone down before running out of bullet tricks.
Those tricks are thoughtfully rationed out as the levels progress, and include things like using the fuel caps of cars to cause an explosion to kill nearby enemies and give you a bonus chance to redirect your bullet, or the ability to gently steer it by several degrees to strike moving targets. Later still, you’ll learn the ability to rapidly accelerate bullets to smash through armour, and to use successful hits of enemy weak spots to bank an on-demand trajectory change in any direction. Adding these new techniques to the overall system keeps things from becoming stagnant, and the way in which Children of the Sun encourages us to experiment and combine all these tricks is where it excels most. Need some height? Shoot a bird to gain a better view of the level and a bonus trajectory change while you’re at it. Too close to an armoured goon? Rack up some weak spot strikes on some standard cultists, send your shot out into the distance, and then re-fire it in from afar with a little extra sauce on it.
Master of a Speeding Bullet
There’s a scoring system at work within Children of the Sun, and even leaderboards attached to each level to compare your best attempts with both your friends and the rest of the world. I expect this is nice if you’re a ruthlessly competitive type, but killing everyone in a level in a slightly different order (to see if there’s a marginally faster way to do it) isn’t really enough to have me leaping back in to replay all the levels. The layouts of some of the later maps proved complex enough to tempt me back for another few tries but, with the enemies always more or less in the same spots, it’s a bit like solving the same crossword puzzle over and over. It’s just not significantly satisfying after the first time around.
For clarity’s sake, one last thing I really ought to add is that when I say bullet, I really mean cartridge. Unfortunately, Children of the Sun commits the cardinal slow motion sin of showing a bullet in flight as the entire cartridge – with the case and primer still attached. Clearly, The Girl went to the Portal turret school of ballistics (where firing the whole bullet means 65% more bullet per bullet!) It’s a small goof in the scheme of things but it’s a pretty dorky error, and it’s a shame it’s made it all the way to the final product. I guess you could potentially mount an argument that The Girl’s telekinetic powers allow her to move an unfired cartridge through the air like a deadly dart, but it wouldn’t really stand up. If that were really the case, why does it come out of the rifle like that? Why would she need a rifle at all? She could just chuck killer cartridges through the air like Charlie Sheen in Hot Shots! Part Deux.
