Children of the Sun

This slick and shrewd supernatural sniping game is packed with satisfying spatial problems to solve (and shoot), but it's not significantly satisfying after the first time around.

Children of the Sun's gritty and surreal world is home to an innovative puzzle game that mixes long-range sniping with macabre brain teasers, culminating in your enemy's brains painting the walls.

Gory and exacting, Children of the Sun mixes the highs of tactical precision and cracking a killer puzzle.

A killer puzzle game that tests your skill and your patience.

Children of the Sun is a prime example of an experience born from a straightforward premise and then iterated for the right amount of time before it loses its charm. On occasion, the central mechanic can't keep up with itself – I missed more than a few finicky shots that should have landed, forcing a retry. But once you successfully execute a strategy and finish a level, the satisfaction is unmatched. You then seek to replicate the feeling during subsequent hunts, completely alienated from the messiness of your actions as you chase a higher score.

Despite some frustrations, Children Of The Sun is an intense shooter-puzzler with bags of style and originality.

Children of the Sun is a short but special game that is definitely bang for your buck.

Children of the Sun excels where it counts. It’s a cerebral puzzle in which you weave a bullet between targets, and solving the puzzle is dangerously satisfying.

Children of the Sun stumbles on story, but its unnerving hyper violence hits its mark.

While many will feel it's one or two chapters short of a truly fleshed-out and fully-realized vision, Children of the Sun's short but lavish flair for the hyper-violent is one of both visual and audible delight throughout. With what might be one of the most interesting and quick-to-convince takes on shooter mechanics in many a year, developer Rene Rother's knack for the look and feel of such an onslaught allows both art-style and gameplay alike to boldly glisten. As divisive the in-game graphics and general presentation might wind up being. But it's in no small part thanks to composer Aidan Baker's treatment of sound on top that only emboldens Rother's vision more so as one of both depth and replayability. An easy-to-understand pitch that comes with just as easy a recommendation, Children of the Sun is a blistering but brilliant take on shooting as a puzzle to be solved.