By Timothy "DevilsAlias" Pecoraro

Playing Flow is very hard to describe. The "game," puts the player as a small segmented organism swimming around in an oceanic type environment. As this organism you eat through a bunch of even smaller organisms. As the little organism gets bigger it can eat even bigger things. The organism grows in complexity and size as it moves further down into the oceanic environment and as the organism does so, it changes sometimes in color and sometimes in both complexity and color. Once this is done, the player gets sent back to the beginning again and the player gets a whole new type of organism to play through a somewhat typical scenario all over again. In moving from character to character you get to use many different "special," abilities such as turbo movement or a blast of poison to stun enemies.

This would be great if not for the fact that there is no penalty for making mistakes or not doing much of anything in Flow. The player really cannot lose unless, the player purposely chooses to do so. If this were any other game it would be unusual, but in conjunction with this, you also get to use the SIXAXIS controller using it's motion sensitive control to steer the little creatures in their watery world. This sounds wonderful on paper but the reality is a little different. For the first half of the life of cycle of the first creature the player could spend as much as that trying to figure out how to steer the creature around it's environment.

When the game is looked at with a bit of scrutiny it is hard to take the game very seriously in the sense that it barely qualifies as a game like Electroplankton or some of the rhythm games that have appeared in the market lately. Unlike a game like Guitar Hero though, Flow just doesn't form or try to form any actual competitiveness or even game theory. For some players $7.99 may seem like too much to pay for what really boils down to an interactive art piece. For the length of the game being around two hours for most this could be worth the price of admission.

7.5/10

They Say:

Gamespot: 7.1
1UP.com: 7.7

Normally I would have more but Gamespot was the only one who reviewed it.