Role-playing games are often a place for serious storytelling. Although there are funny moments here and there, there's not much room for humor in stories such as Mass Effect's galactic apocalypse or the ecological crisis of Final Fantasy 7. Not so with Citizens Unite!: Earth x Space from developer Eden Industries, which jumps into the genre with its tongue firmly in its cheek.
Citizens Unite!: Earth x Space is something of a compilation, uniting Eden's efforts of Citizens of Earth and Citizens of Space into one complete package. The two games work together well thanks to a shared sense of comedy, with through-roads in terms of continued jokes and in-universe properties. This amalgamation then includes elements that tie the two games together, such as the inclusion of the Chronies, a new enemy that is causing temporal shifts.
Although this element could make it confusing for new players, thankfully these changes appear to be light to the touch. New users will have no problem jumping into Citizens Unite!: Earth x Space and understanding its key story, and it still feels like two games rather than one cohesive experience. On the Nintendo Switch, swapping between the two games is as simple as a press of the minus button, and it's refreshing to hop between Earth and Space with ease.
The main selling point of Citizens Unite!: Earth x Space is of course its humor, and given truly funny video games are few and far between - aside from notable standouts like Kosmokrats and Not Tonight - this could be a place for the title to truly excel. Both Earth and Space contain the same style of absurd, silly humor, and overall it works rather well. Its voice acting can get a little much at times, but in general it hits the mark without being uproariously hilarious.
It's at its best in Citizens of Earth, as the title has a bizarre mundanity that adds to the humor. The player character's Vice President of the World is still living in his childhood home with his mother and brother, and wandering around solving the problems of day-to-day citizens in a strange, ToeJam & Earl-esque world. It never lands quite as well in Space, as much as it lampoons the tropes of a bright, spacebound future.
When it comes to gameplay, however, the qualities of the two are reversed. Earth is a perfectly fine turn-based RPG, emulating the success of Earthbound, but its battles get repetitive and it's a little simple throughout. Space, meanwhile, adds quick time events and mini games similar to Paper Mario or South Park's excellent RPG efforts, which take a weight off the tactical side and tie better into the game's jovial approach.
The gimmick of both games is the liberal recruitment of allies, with nearly 100 available across the two games. Mechanically these allies fit the usual RPG tropes of healers, tanks, or mages, even if the characters appear as psychologists or body builders. Space adds a little more to the mix, thanks to a split between battling and support allies to add a modicum of complexity to its structure. In general the character design is strong too, particularly with the Ren & Stimpy stylings of Earth that do well to match the tone of its writing. That said, it can begin to grate, with overly repetitive animations and vocal snippets that are perhaps a little too chatty when repeating basic actions.
Overall, Citizens Unite!: Earth x Space is the kind of RPG that players can easily chip away at for some light entertainment. Its gameplay never really becomes deep enough to be a selling point on its own for when the humor fails to land, but much of the time the game's tone hits the right spot. Given its relatively unique place in the market, it's certainly a solid place to turn for RPGs fans after something different.
Citizens Unite!: Earth x Space releases today, January 28, 2021 for PC, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. Screen Rant was provided with a Switch download code for the purposes of this review.