Review: Body Harvest (N64)

The N64 is quite rightly viewed as a major gaming platform for kids; such was the sickly sweet aspirations of Nintendo to position the format in such a position. A casualty of this stance was Body Harvest, which was heavily delayed whilst Nintendo decided what to do with the game. Just why they greenlight such a project we’ll never know. For all its quality, the system was in desperate need of an action release that appealed to older gamers. The job fell to DMA who would later go onto create the gaming phenomenon that is Grand Theft Auto. The first seeds of that epic are very evident in Body Harvest including that touch of Brit humour. Dropping the title and the potential of that future is certainly not one of Nintendo’s best decisions.

The enticing factor of Body Harvest was that allowed you to explore a huge apocalyptic environment, shooting aliens, selecting missions and romping around the neighbourhood in a variety of vehicles. Arguably it is GTA in the near distant future, but Body Harvest is very much the black sheep of the family. A loveable rogue with many faults, the aspirations of the developer were too high for the platform. Leaving us with a flawed and ugly offering that still manages to entertain.

You take the role of Drake, a futuristic soldier who looks like a cheap extra from Halo, except you have the ability to time travel. This ingredient sets up a Terminator twist to the game play as you will journey across time fighting the alien invaders and disrupting their plans. The title of the game gives away the aliens intent, and on a consistent basis they visit the Earth and extract the resources they require. Rather than split the game across a widespread period of history, DMA Design wisely chose to condense the levels. Body Harvest sets up encounters every 25 years and as you succeed on one timeframe you are catapulted to the next period. The alien race could have been plucked from Starship Troopers or any B-movie, as bugs are perfect for blasting and exploding.

The missions in the game are fairly basic and often involve utilising vehicles from the period to reach your destination within a certain time. These included cars but also helicopters, boats and tanks, adding up to more than sixty possibilities. While the majority of mission types just simply reappeared on the next level with little change, for its time this freedom to explore was remarkable. As with the GTA series the structure comes in for criticism, as few missions really are memorable. It is funny how that issue exists still today, despite the major power offered by today’s consoles. Of course there were a few exceptions and Body Harvest also threw in the human casualty aspect to consider. As a protector of the human race it was important that you did not add to the already dwindling stock of residents, or allowed the Harvesters to succeed. This often meant detouring from your existing target to engage the harvest aliens to prevent causalities becoming critical.

The boss encounters were interesting and only occurred once you had destroyed the shield generator at the end of each level. These exposed a flaw in the overall design by insisting that the player can only save after completing a major mission or event. This created a great deal of frustration, especially when self inflicted errors such a bad driving or a poor decision hurt more than they should of. However at least you could save on the cartridge with ease, avoiding pak swapping so common at the time.

Body Harvest’s impact was minor at the time, finding favour with only a few. The delay from Nintendo meant that when it did see the light of day it was already graphically mundane. This from a system was already well known for its foggy and muddy visuals! Body Harvest was particularly visually restricted and suffered from horrendous slow down when the screen became busy. Yet the soundtrack is fantastic and blasting aliens remains as fun today as it was 1998.

Rating: 7 / 10

Words by Jason Julier