Review: A World of Keflings – It Came From Outer Space DLC (XBLA)

I have a bit of a love-love relationship with NinjaBee’s games. When we first got our current Xbox 360, I was browsing through the XBL Marketplace and decided to look through the avatar games, where I found A Kingdom for Keflings. I showed my wife, we took a risk and bought some points, and had a blast. When we first heard that a sequel was being developed in A World of Keflings, our excitement was palpable, and we experienced a game improved in every way. When we saw Akimi Village at E3, my wife almost skipped other appointments to continue sitting there playing, and when we got our hands on it to review, we found that it had some really innovative advancements over the Keflings series (that hopefully will make their way into a third Keflings game one day). Now, I get to return to my World of Keflings with the newly released It Came From Outer Space DLC, and I couldn’t be happier. Well, I could be a little happier, but we’ll talk about that in a few paragraphs.

The first thing I did when I downloaded the DLC was load up my saved completed campaign and start looking through all three of my realms for signs of the crashed aliens. After about five minutes of searching unsuccessfully, I returned to the main menu and tried a new campaign, at which point I saw the separate mini-campaign option. When you start, it seems that you and a couple of your larger Kefling assistants are out walking around a canyon area when you come across a group of crashed aliens. You then proceed to help repair the aliens’ ship so that they can return. In order to do so, however, you need to build a few different buildings in order to produce the items you need.

This is where It Came From Outer Space introduces a new gameplay element: the metamorph carrot. As you build some of the new blueprints, you’ll notice that a few of them contain very large live animals, like the Gravity Lobster and the Nebula Panda. These are material conversion buildings that will convert sand, leaves, sulphur, or junk parts into more advanced materials. They will only convert into some of the advanced materials, however. You will need to build duplicates of each living conversion building and feed the duplicates metamorph carrots to transform them into a modified conversion building. The Gravity Lobster, for example, converts sand to proto-plastic. The modified Nuclear Lobster, however, converts sand into nuclear rods.

Oh, by the way, you can’t harvest sulphur or junk parts. You have to build a special robot unit (in much the same way you would build houses to generate Keflings) which is then capable of harvesting sulphur and junk parts. These are handy little creatures, so you can’t have too many of them.

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Aside from being treated to a robotic mix of the original World of Keflings music, It Came From Outer Space is flat out funny and filled with geek and pop culture references. Where are the aliens from? Yurbut. What is the mad scientist alien’s name? Dr. Snippetoff. What is the diplomatic alien senator’s name? Senator Hadookin. With mission references mixing David Bowie and Arthur C. Clark (2001 Space Oddity), Back to the Future (1.21 Gigawatts), and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Stowaway’s Guide to the Universe), there’s a lot here to catch your attention.

It Came From Outer Space, as funny as it is, and as entertaining as it is, is very short. At 800MSP, A World of Keflings provided me with approximately 13 hours of play in the main campaign alone, excluding multiplayer. At 320MSP, It Came From Outer Space provided me with approximately 1.5 hours of play in the new mini-campaign. Part of the success of A World of Keflings was the multiple stage campaign, going from a frozen land to a desert land to a forested land. The sum of the environments provided a great deal of play space, and the number of available blueprints was large across all three areas. It Came From Outer Space provides you with one area and a dozen or so blueprints from start to finish.

While A World of Kefling’s first DLC, It Came From Outer Space, is disappointingly short, it is still extremely satisfying. In the grand scheme of things, it may not give you as much play time per dollar spent, but what play time it does give you is very entertaining. From the wonderful robotic twist on the classic Keflings music to the wonderful geek humor references and the interesting new gameplay elements, It Came From Outer Space is easily a 320MSP well spent. I can only hope that NinjaBee has a plan to provide more, longer DLC in the near future.