Left Behind: Eternal Forces

Its been a while since I've seen a slightly wonky interface, but Eternal Forces gets close. The camera gives you vast cityscapes to work with, but, like playing on top of a 40 storey building, even your hero units look like insignificant specks. The buildings themselves seem strangely under-detailed too, being little more than low poly blocks. The arrow shows Leonard Lindelof, one of our Everyman hero units in the single player missions. If you wanted to see him clearly I'd have to leave the image at is full 1680x1050 size (not worth my bandwidth, to be honest) - and he still looks like a blot of pixels. It makes identifying different units in a hurry a real hassle. The game does rely on some automation to get around some of these issues, but corralling your force is an effort in itself.

The actual demo itself was a bit of a mixed affair: my biggest enemy wasn't so much the Anti-Christ's forces so much as the tall buildings blocking my view and the general opaqueness of what I was supposed to be doing. Your units are mere specks in the distance. Its very hard to identify them unless you zoom right in, whereupon it gets very easy to disorientate yourself. You renovate and convert buildings to be part of your cause; and train professionals to run them. You produce a variety of resources to sustain your forces and there's a tech tree. You renovate buildings into cafes (food), banks (money), chapels (Spirit) and others. However, also squirreled away are Houses of Wisdom, presenting you with some Biblical multiple choice questions (as well as some bizarre pseudo-scientific ones) that lead to to a Don't Be Left Behind forum that's quite clearly a cluster of slick, cashed up ministries prowling for new converts. There's also a surprising barrage of real life (secular) advertising all through the city maps, as well. Might a portent for the future, I'm afraid.

Eternal Forces has plenty of unintentionally hilarious moments mixed with rather obnoxious ones. Its also delightfully sexist in an old fashioned way: for example, Builders and Soldiers can only be male, and women can only have careers in medicine (as nursey looking Medics in heels and nurse's cap), playing music or spreading the Word. Most of the citizenry you convert seem to be 90% male. And there are other little touches throughout: e.g. converted passerby's are classified as a Friend, but for some reason female friends are explicitly singled out as being Friend Woman. Me Rak-Rent. You. Friend! Wo-man. Its tiresome enough wading through stupid games aimed at bored, horny 15 y.o. males with their hand down their crotch, but its sort of weird to find old patriachial sexism preserved as some kind of authoritative moral stance. As is the social conformity - all converted units look, sound and dress alike. But all the Unsaved are different.

A pair of Praisers contemplate the unthinkable.

In the Left Behind series, the Saved remain in Heaven with Jesus for about seven years, at which a series of God delivered Tribulations annihilates something like half the world's surviving population (beat that, Nicola!). In the meantime, the Anti-Christ (Carpathia) has forced all people to wear his 666 Mark, on pain of death if they refuse. Despite the coercion, many people rebel against Carpathia, and inspired by those Raptured, become Tribulation Saints and embrace Jesus as their Messiah. The Second Coming takes place when Jesus returns, along with all the Saved), kills the Anti-Christ, and begins his joyous reign on earth, or the thousand year Millennium - which, if you read between the lines, results in the judgment and deaths of all unbelievers and their consignment to the Lake of Fire. This is not Jesus the Saviour, Redemeer or Forgiver - this is Jesus the Destroyer. Humanity''s only choice seems to be that between two bloody minded forces of mass destruction and murder; one of which is preordained to win, regardless of what you try and do.

The undeniable bottom line is: in Eternal Forces you convert or fight the Unsaved to change the United States into a theocracy to further God's plan for the Millennium. And I bet some of you thought only the "Islamofascists" were the ones completely off the rails.

Spirit is your all-important resource. It is generated through prayer (which all your units can do) and further gained when you do good deeds (like convert someone). It is lost when you encounter the enemies' minions. Lose enough Spirit and you become neutral, or worse, sympathetic to Carpathia's side. Spirit is an attribute exclusive to the Tribulation Force; that is, if you're not Saved, you're clearly incapable of producing it. I wonder what other religions - or just anyone with their own thoughts and beliefs - can help but make of that one. Not much. But paradoxically, your good guy units are amazingly brittle in Spirit. In the single player story missions, you can lose in mere seconds just by standing near evil rock musicians (Yep - they still have that bee in their bonnet) The big problem is that the entire mission can abruptly end for you when one of your units in that big cityscape suddenly has an attack of faith. As far as I could tell, just standing around anyone with a strong opinion other than your own is highly hazardous to the Tribulation Force.

If there was one aspect to this game that showed a little promise, it was how Spirit is lost when you engage and kill the opposition's army, regardless of circumstance. Blow away the enemy too much and you can succumb to Evil yourself. Its about the only nice touch in the entire game, and definitely something someone (without an agenda!) should explore.

Recruiting Praisers for your missions. Everyone you meet instantly recognises how right you are and totally Converts without so much as a backward glance - just as in real life! Interesting thing is how all the wild and woolly New Yorkers all transform into a Ned Flanders like creature with the same brown waist coat. Praisers follow you around, shouting "Praise the Lord!" just a little too often but they can be upgraded into other professions, based on gender, in one of your renovated buildings.

Overall, it feels shallow, one dimensional, and vapid. Its world view is predictably screwed up and barely sustainable even as fantasy fiction. I have to confess it simply reinforced a lot of crude generalisations and caricatures I hold when it comes to Bible Christians. Its not as if I haven't talked with religious folk before; some of the most profound and complex ways of seeing the world I ever encountered came from the Ba'hai; wrestling with the everyday world and reconciling one's relationship with God is a daily occurrence for most people, regardless of their beliefs. Its not a question of rationality nor of "proof"; these are trite materialistic things; parlour games. Faith - whatever that is - is an altogether elusive creature, a source of comfort, meaning and challenge.

There's absolutely none of that in Eternal Forces. I can only associate introspection, religious meaning and spirituality with Left Behind in the same way I associate pity and mercy with the Daleks - two mutually exclusive concepts. Everyone I know (including myself) have thoughts and beliefs on something. Not having a God in them makes them no less important, profound or meaningless - any more than not believing in Thor or Zeus does.

There was no set of drama or suspense, or any sense of wanting to progress through levels, anyway. Why would you? In Eternal Forces, God's immutable plan runs on rails, and there's nothing you can do or say about it except submit to the inevitable and surrender to it. You know how its going to end, the question is simply how soon the player "gets it" and converts. In that regard, I came away from the game feeling that Left Behind's theology isn't just shallow and cheap, its also smug and completely arrogant. At the same time there's an implied sense of being special, all wrapped up in a persecution complex. The tiny Tribulation Force are the only people who know what's going on, the only ones realize their importance with Divine Truth, the only ones with the inside special knowledge of God himself, and yet are faced with a vast, world spanning conspiracy to thwart their tiny selves. Everyone else is, literally (although this never gets explicitly mentioned), going to Hell. This game makes a point of never mentioning the words "Christian" or "convert" either, but this is entirely what this game is all about.

Eternal Forces is another fucking recruiting tool.

Its on the prowl. It has a real life agenda. Eternal Forces is merely a delivery system for a particular type of (I had to look this one up) dispensational premillennial Christianity. You can read up on the Dispensationism and Premillennial schools of Christianity here. There are as many different versions of the End Times as there are people to literally believe in them.

And there's half my problem with this game right there: just say the magic words and hey presto! instant salvation and a free trip to Heaven for you. Its more McReligion from the States, packaged and commodified and based on a very modern way of looking at select bits of the Bible. Its Salvation for the lazy slob, who gets with it a side of fried Specialness and a large cardboard cup of self-righteousness; who can join an exclusive club separate from the rest of us without the need to work at it or even bother to care. There's no challenge or "pilgrim's progress" to Salvation through a journey of trials, tribulations and discovery; (not even a puzzle to solve other than those silly multiple choice questions) the answer in Eternal Forces is all about numbers to your cause; conform, convert, and wait in line for your Special Prize in God. Faith as a convenient, trouble free consumer item. Would you like a special Mark with that, sir?

[Edit: speaking of cursed Marks, Eternal Forces also ships with some seriously noxious Israeli spyware.]

You might be wondering (and probably by now, grinding your teeth at) a computer game review that's wandered off into the realms of soap boxing. I suppose I could just "change the channel" and exercise my right to ignore it. If you really can't stand a critique, I suggest you go to a "professional" game site and get a glowing review [i.e. consumer advice] based purely on its technical merits in a vacuum. Point is, if this was merely just a computer game referring to a fictional series it'd score some smarty pant remarks and that'd be the end of it. But it's not. Its gone out of its way to deliberately bend my world, so I'll cheerfully take the piss back. Worse, its polarised in its views too, so its not just trying to change minds as much as actually create divisions where none exist and generate intractable conflicts out of ... nothing. Religious freedom is not a blank cheque to indulge in religious warfare. Especially from fools who can't distinguish real from fictional, and especially from a bunch of losers who's views are so poisonous that they operate in stealth and can barely be sustained in a limited, primitive game world of their own making. Cheerio! And God bless bugger orf! that's ENOUGH with the propaganda. Do you think we're all mindless, programmable retards? FUCK OFF!