Garden Gnome Carnage is the insanity that develops in the minds of those who bear witness to the might and majesty of the Old Ones. It is the exhilaration of nailing the guy at the front of the pack with a blue shell in Mario Kart 64, squeaking past him while he recovers to snag a first place finish for oneself. It is even the frustration of fighting your way through hoards of enemies in Shinobi only to get walloped over and over by dogs with knives in their mouths.
It’s a game about a garden gnome attached to the top of an apartment building on wheels, spinning wildly in a circle to lob exploding bricks at impossible numbers of incoming soldiers while sometimes calling in a massive airstrike handed to you by a little girl in a window. Also there’s a cat who is your friend. The best way to put it is that it is off-the-wall madness.
It takes a minute, but once you figure out exactly how to spin the gnome so he is angled exactly where you need him to be, you’ll find you can suddenly protect yourself from thousands of soldiers at once. It’s almost like chess in that you find yourself suddenly thinking ahead of where the game actually is, instinctively knowing where your gnome needs to be on the next pass to keep the apartment building relatively clean. The best part? There are plenty of little tricks you catch on to with each subsequent play.
I had no idea I could hold down a button and cause the entire apartment building to explode every single brick left on it in a storm of hellfire and flashing lights until I accidentally did it during a random playthrough. It wasn’t until my second or third playthrough that I was whisked away from my duty of soldier smashing to play through a rudimentary platformer (of which I have no idea the benefit to completing it, if there even is one).
It’s surprisingly difficult to put exactly in to words how to make you want to try and play this game. All I can say is play it. Pay the handful of points you may very well have kicking in your account, get this baffling indie title and experience it for yourself.
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Visit the Xbox Live Marketplace to download a free demo of Garden Gnome Carnage for Xbox 360.
Garden Gnome Carnage was provided for review by Ludosity Interactive. It is available for 80 MS points ($1).
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