The 3rd Birthday is filled with trick candles. They're amusing at first, but eventually they get annoying.
Even though the audience knows Aya Brea's history, she doesn't. For some mysterious reason, revealed toward the end of the game, Aya has no memory of her past or her real identity. Ignoring the fact that she knows her name and could feasibly do a little basic research, we ignore the first of many plot holes in order to immerse ourselves in the latest brain melting offering from Square Enix.
The premise is simple. Aya Brea works for a generic counter-terrorist organization that employs the most stereotypical archetypes of the genre. She is tasked with saving the world from an abstract threat known as the Twisted. The Twisted want to eat the space-time continuum and Aya is expected to stop them by sending her consciousness into the past to control a cast of everyman extras. Aya possesses random soldier, she shoots the monsters, they die, she repeats the process. Every so often you have to face an enemy that doesn't respond to the usual aim and fire technique and you have to determine the trick to getting past its defenses. You also get to run away a few times. If Aya is successful, time should continue unabated and all will be right with the world.
The mechanics leave little to be desired. It's a Playstation Portable game, after all, and my expectations of game mechanics for any portable device tend to be fairly low. I find the movement to be fairly smooth, though the camera redirection controls are awkward. This is easily overcome by simply clicking the left trigger to refocus the camera. If your biggest complaint is camera angles, give your index finger a little exercise. Problem solved.
The real meat of the game mechanics is the Overdive system. By targeting a person with the Overdive, Aya is able to possess the body and carry out her mission. This allows her to leap from one body to another during combat, and more than one situation requires repeated use of this technique in order to survive. It can literally mean the difference between life and death. More tactical players will utilize this feature to move the soldiers around the battlefield to create ideal crossfire situations and to maintain at least one body as an escape route in case things go from bad to worse.
Bearing in mind that my copy of the game came in the mail from GameFly, I had a little trouble puzzling out the firearm customization. Unfortunately, this says more about how little I was paying attention and less about the game itself. I was so caught up in trying to figure out which real world weapons the designers were approximating that I didn't actually examine the statistics of the weapon as I swapped out custom parts. In other words, the system is simplistic to a fault. But this isn't Modern Warfare, and it's hard to take complaints about realism seriously when we're discussing the idea of using mind control on people in the past. While higher difficulties of the game do capitalize on the concept that some weapons are more effective against specific foes, this dynamic is not a necessity for completing the game. In other words, use the weapons you like and get on with killing monsters.
An interesting mechanic in The 3rd Birthday is the Over Energy system. By defeating Twisted with a special attack known as "Overdive Kill" Aya collects DNA from the various creatures. By plugging this DNA into a 3x3 grid, she is able to customize her own DNA and unlock a miscellany of abilities and quirks. Be sure to read the "list" of features for each DNA sequence before committing to your changes or you may find that you didn't program the DNA board quite the way you meant to. If you're so inclined, you can program more than one DNA board, multiple boards being unlocked after achieving certain goals such as level or game completion. Having DNA boards for specific tasks proves handy and increases the chance that you will have just the right abilities to survive some of the more frustrating scenarios. This is arguably the most interesting feature of the game.
Once the mechanics are sorted out, the game plays well. All things considered, the controls are smooth and intuitive. The only real complaint I have about the mechanics is that they can sometimes be so simple that it's easy to miss the obvious.
That leaves us with the story, in which lies my real complaint. I am a fan of well written stories and have a fondness for plot twists. I enjoy character development and enjoy unraveling mysteries. What I do not like is trying to solve the mystery of why I am bothering to play a game. The simple truth of the matter is that The 3rd Birthday lacks cohesion. It feels like each chapter was written by a different team and none of them were allowed to communicate with each other. What should be plot twists turn into plot holes. The reveals feel more like a game of whack-a-mole, with hints and clues popping up but disappearing just as you try to grasp them. Worse, the chapters are essentially a series of "game over" scenarios that lead into some kind of alternate time ribbon in which the previous catastrophic event apparently didn't happen.
It isn't that the story is too complex. It's that it's not well written. Perhaps something was lost in translation. Perhaps the writers simply didn't care. After all, when the battle-damage is represented by Aya's clothing shredding down to near nothing, who needs a compelling plot?
Even with my complaints about the story, I enjoyed the game. I admit that I have indulged in a bit of hyperbole to air my frustrations about the story, but even with the ridiculous explanation at the end of the game, I don't regret spending the past few days on The 3rd Birthday and I actually hope Square Enix puts out another game using the Overdive combat system.
The verdict: rent, don't buy, but give the game a chance.