Who is God

Who is God?  Well I thought the answer was obvious: Jeremy Clarkson.  But apparently the guys at Magiko Gaming disagreed.  The latest game by the guys behind the Platformance series is one of those annoying “climb as high as you can” games that are all over the cell phone market like pimples on a teenaged Hershey enthusiast.  I’ve already played a similar title, Niji, and felt it stunk like rancid tuna.  Expectations were set low.

In Who is God you play as one of four deities who must hop from platform to platform on their way towards Heaven.  Jumping is done automatically, so all you really have to do is move the character.  Along the way, you collect stars which can be used to give you a boost, potentially saving you from death or just flinging you higher.  There’s a few different types of platforms to land on.  Some of them disappear once you hop off.  Some of them make new platforms appear.  Some of them steal precious star power from you.  I’m guessing those are called “WELL FUCK!” because that is what I often blurted out when I landed on one.

And that’s pretty much it.  You just climb as high as you can get and try to land on the high score list.  I’m currently #15 on the list and I’m sure everyone else will have the courtesy to not beat my score of 68,868 feet.

Actually by the time I started writing this review, I had already dropped to 18th.  Man, these high score lists can be humbling.  I want another crack at it.

Okay, 72,364.  I moved to 17th at least.  I might actually give it another chance later, but one of the problems is the maps are randomly generated.  Thus there’s always a degree of luck that sometimes outweighs any skill involved.

Who is God has no alternative modes of play right now.  Magiko does have a tendency to patch-in extra stuff later on, so that might change, but for now what you see is what you get.  And what you get is actually a surprisingly fun experience.  If you’re looking for something deep and complex, go read some Melville.  Who is God is pure, stupid bliss.  It’s one of those games that makes your palms sweat and your fingers twitch.  I can’t even tell you what I thought about the graphics or the sound because I was so sucked in to it that I didn’t even notice.  I told my boyfriend I would play it for thirty minutes and I ended up playing for nearly two hours.  That is the mark of a good game.  My only petty complaint is the name.  Who is God.  What is this, Jeopardy?  Otherwise, I really enjoyed it.  And hey, since it seems like the average Xbox 360 owner’s only goal in life is to see how high they can get, this should fit them like a glove.

Who is God was developed by Magiko Gaming

80 Microsoft Points were children of lesser Gods in the making of this review.

Millennium Man

Millennium Man is a 2D platform-puzzler where you play as a dude trying to escape from jail.  The gimmick here is that you have the ability to manipulate time.  It’s an idea that’s been done before, but never quite like this.  At least I don’t think so. I’m sure there will be tons of lifeless douchebags lining up to correct me on that.*

There are ten stages and the object of each is to simply get to the door.  However, the door is often blocked or inaccessible.   This is where  the time gimmick comes into play.  Using the X button, you open up the time device which you can then shift back and forth until the terrain is altered.  It’s kind of like The Time Machine, just without the Morlocks.

Going off the screen-shots, I didn’t expect much from Millennium Man.  It looks like it was drawn using Kid Pix.  And while the gimmick is used decently, my suspicions were mostly correct.  The puzzles are very basic in design, so much so that what’s here feels more like a tutorial.  Given that the whole game takes about fifteen minutes to complete, I think I might be on to something there.  Everything here seems like it’s in an embryonic stage of development.

The graphics are bland, but the real problem was the play control.  This is a platformer, after all.  And once again, we have a game that needed the precision of the digital pad but failed to map to it.  Instead, the analog stick controls everything, and that’s a major flaw.  Without actual analog controls, it makes movement feel slippery and inaccurate.  The jumping is also way off.  The physics are a touch on the floaty side, while some platforms are needlessly placed at the maximum allotted distance, allowing no room for error.

The idea behind Millennium Man feels like the basis for a great game.  Witnessing the environmental changes happen while paused mid-jump is a wonderful thrill.  The final jumping puzzle of the game might be my favorite one yet of any indie game.  And yet all the problems are too much to ignore.  This is under cooked pork.  It’s palatable but you could get worms from it.   Even the control bits don’t up the difficulty here.  You should breeze through the puzzles.  And if you don’t, I’ve included a handy FAQ for Millennium Man.

Q: How do I beat this puzzle in Millennium Man?

A: The average six-year old should be able to beat every puzzle in Millennium Man, Trailer Park King, or Tourist Trap.  If you can’t figure these out on your own, perhaps you should go smoke the tailpipe of your own car because you are officially a Paris Hilton-level functional retard.

Millennium Man was developed by Fixed-Point Consulting LLC

80 Microsoft Points thought Jeremy Irons was sexy as the king of the Morlocks in the making of this review.

*Not everyone who points out every little mistake made in my reviews are lifeless douchebags.  Some of you are mere losers while others just need to get laid.

Fatal Seduction

I’ve busted on Silver Dollar Games a few times since starting Indie Gamer Chick, but I haven’t yet reviewed one of their titles. Oh, I’ve played a few of them, and found them all to be unmitigated pieces of shit. The only one that I thought had any remote value was Try Not To Fart, which is absurd and unfunny but it does serve as a functional game of video Twister.

I was guessing they wouldn’t ever contact me requesting a review of one of their games. And then came the e-mail asking me to check out Fatal Seduction. “Well fuckberries!” I thought. My policy is I can’t turn down a review request so I had to put on the proper manure-handling gear and plunge in. I braced myself for what was sure to be the worst fifteen minutes of my life since I got temporarily paralyzed on the couch while watching America’s Got Talent.

Fatal Seduction is a truly bizarre platforming game. You play as a girl who narrates her story to a psychiatrist in a mental hospital. The game play is incredibly simple. Walk, double jump, stab things, or shoot fireballs at ghosts. Meanwhile, the story is some seriously demented shit. The girl tells the shrink that an angel has told her that she must murder all of her fathers girlfriends to prevent the Antichrist from being born. This leads to three boss encounters with fetuses. I’m not making that up. Go back and read that line. The bosses in this game are demon possessed fetuses that you must stab to death. It’s like Rosemary’s Baby as told by Planned Parenthood.

And I seriously fucking loved it.

Oh I hated the game play. It was boring, repetitive, poorly controlled, badly designed, and as shallow as anything else Silver Dollar Games has turned out. But holy crap, that was a seriously captivating story. And I don’t know who they got to do the voice acting of the girl, but standing ovation for her, the creepy little bitch. If only they had taken this plot and given it to a studio with actual talent in game design, it might have set a new benchmark in excellence on the indie marketplace.

So yes, the actual “game” part of the game sucks, but I do recommend purchasing Fatal Seduction. It only takes fifteen minutes to complete and the narrative more than makes up for any flaws it has. It also might come in handy some day if you want to explain to your significant other why you don’t want to have any kids. It can be your go-to “they could turn out creepy, like this girl” argument. Previously I used the Olson twins.

Fatal Seduction was developed by Silver Dollar Games

80 Microsoft Points embraced contraceptive sponges in the making of this review.

Crosstown

It’s been pointed out to me that I’m a total hypocrite.  I just dumped on Retrocade: DataStream Y2K600 for being “retro” and yet my #1 game is LaserCat, which has a bit of an old-school vibe going for it.  But that doesn’t make me a hypocrite.  It makes me complicated.

I found Crosstown just by cruising randomly through the indie marketplace.  Having been released in 2009, it’s the oldest game I’ve subjected to review thus far.  And it’s actually really good.  You play as this dude with a gun who’s stuck in some crazy town populated by monsters.  The object is to grab four rings in each of the forty stages.  You can shoot the enemies, but you really don’t have to.  For the most part they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone.  You also can use your gun as a drill to break through walls and get to the rings faster.

Crosstown looks like it will be slow-paced and plodding.  After only a few levels the craziness starts to begin.  Enemies are all over the screen, so much so that they begin to attack each-other.  It opens up multiple options for strategy.  You can go on the offense and gun down as many guys as you can to clear sections of the screen.  Enemies do respawn, but I found this tactic to be effective, especially against baddies that lay extra walls down.  Alternatively, you can try to be a sneak and just go after the enemies who pick up the rings.  I found this usually resulted in beating levels quicker, but at greater risk due to having more monsters on-screen at once.

You’re given a few marginally helpful tools.  Every time you grab a ring, you can spend it towards upgrading your gun, your ability to drill blocks, or your speed.  If you do this, you lose the ring and it will respawn on the board.  For the most part I never needed to use these boosters, although they did come in handy during a boss battle.

I wholeheartedly endorse Crosstown.  It looks old school but at its heart is an awesome action game.  The difference between it and something like Retrocade is here the Jurassic graphics are just dressing for a game that feels like it would fit in during any era.  It’s one of those titles where a simple design can lead to complex game play.  Besides, sometimes retro can be good.  Party like it’s 1983!  Let’s all do cocaine and vote for Ronald Reagan!

Crosstown was developed by Studio Hunty

80 Microsoft Points said “forget it Jake, it’s Crosstown” like a dope in the making of this review.

Retrocade: DataStream Y2K600

I don’t really get retro gaming.  I can see the appeal in occasionally busting out some childhood favorite and kicking back with it.  But most of the time I do that, the session ends with me blurting out “how could I ever think this was any good?”  There’s a segment of developers, both large and small, who try to recapture the look and feel of those dinosauric games thirty or more years later.

Whether this works or not usually depends on what style they’re aping.  For example, Mega Man 9 was successful because it tried to capture the essence of Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3, aka the only halfway decent entries in that entire series and fuck anyone who disagrees with that.

Did Mega Man 9 work?  Was it still fun?  Yes, it was.  For about five minutes.  Then you likely remembered that we’re now in the future and games have been continuously getting better for the last twenty years.  Why would I spend $10 for it when I can buy a modern game in a clearance bin for the same price?

Nostalgia can be lucrative but it rarely holds up for extended play sessions.  So when MasterBlud recommended Retrocade: DataStream Y2K600 to me, I thought “wow, that’s a terrible name for a game.”  And then I thought “oh goody, an original game in the year 2011 with gameplay and graphics from the year 1976.  How keen.”

Actually, calling it “original” might be  a bit of a stretch.  Retrocade is basically a takeoff on Frogger, even going so far as to have one of its five modes be a clone of it.  The other four modes are pretty much the same.  You control a stick who has to hop around and collect other sticks.  The graphics are straight out of the Atari 2600, which I’m told is a system that required players to use their imagination.  I have absolutely zero imagination, so all I could do was pretend my stick that was picking up other sticks was actually a stick picking up other sticks in a better game.

To keep it real, there is a little fun here.  The mode that stood out to me the most was “Flow Rider.”  It’s simple: move the stick to the top of the screen and then return to the bottom.  The only difference here is once you move onto the play field, you can’t move left or right.  Once you get to the top, the screen starts to fade out and you have to make sure you have the timing down for the return path.  It offers a good challenge and was not an unworthy waste of a few minutes.  “Waypoint,” which is basically the Retrocade’s time-attack mode, is also worth a look at.  Oddly enough the Frogger mode, known here as “Glitcher,” was actually one of the low points of the set.  It’s just not as good as the original and it has some major issues with collision detection. That said, it actually controls better than the official Live Arcade Frogger port .  Way better, in fact.

Retrocade isn’t a bad game by any means.  But it’s a tough sell in this day and age.  Anyone who wants this type of experience would be better served to just dig out some crusty old childhood favorite and give it another look at.  And even if you want something original, there’s a bazillion games that actually date back to that era and I promise you haven’t played even one-tenth of them.  But if you absolutely, positively insist that it has to be a retro game from the year 2011, knock yourself out.  Party like it’s 1977!  Let’s all do mushrooms and go roller skating!

Retrocade: DataStream Y2K600 was developed by QuimbyRBG

80 Microsoft Points don’t know where we went wrong but the feelings gone and we just can’t get it back in the making of this review.

Trailer Park King

Looking for Trailer Park King Episode 2?  The review is here.

Indie games tend to leach onto current fads.  For example, Minecraft has about a dozen knockoffs of varying quality (somewhere between cow shit and pig shit) on the market as we speak.  It’s in that spirit that Freelance Games has looked at the popularity of white trash like Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, and Sarah Palin to give us Trailer Park King, a point-and-click adventure.

In it  you play as King, the titular King of the Trailer Park who gets framed for the murder of his girlfriend’s brother.  You’re given a list of ten suspects to check off and have to provide them with various trinkets to get them to give themselves or others alibis.

There’s really not a whole lot of searching to do in Trailer Park King.  In fact I encountered almost no useless clickables.  Everything that can be interacted with is used, except for a TV that asked me if I wanted to watch porn but failed to come through on that.  There is an annoying bit where you have to access a sheep hired by an escort service (don’t ask) to leave the trailer park and visit the nearby jail.  It seemed like busy work for the sake of making a joke.

Otherwise the presentation works.  The game has well done art and full voice acting.  The accents are way over the top, including the worst French-Canadian one I’ve ever heard, but that kind of adds to the camp value of it.  The script is okay.  It’s not anything special but you’re bound to have a few laughs.  Most of the time you’ll just be shaking your head and saying “well that was fucked up.”  I also really didn’t care for the solution to the mystery.  It does end on a bit of a cliffhanger but it happens so fast that I’m not exactly sure what happened.

I still can’t stand this genre of gaming, but Trailer Park King only takes about an hour to complete and thus doesn’t give you enough time to get bored.  The dialog is just funny enough to make you want to push through to the ending, although I can’t imagine anyone would be satisfied with the murderer’s identity.  Still, it’s always fun to take pot shots at easy targets, like those trashy losers who smoke cigarettes, watch alien abduction shows, and get turned on by guys who get high scores at video games.

Trailer Park King was developed…

HEY!  Wait just a fucking second here… I smoke cigarettes, watch alien abduction shows, and get turned on by guys who get high scores in video games.  Um, move along now.

Trailer Park King was developed by Freelance Games

80 Microsoft Points thought “Holy Basket of Crap” sounded like something from Dairy Queen’s menu in the making of this review.

UPDATED, SPOILERIC HALF-ASSED FAQ FOR TRAILER PARK KING
By popular request from you drool-dispensing half-wits who can’t figure out anything for yourselves, here’s some answers for commonly asked questions about Trailer Park King.  Considering this game is so easy it’s under consideration to be released under the Nick Jr. brand name, you should be hanging your head in fucking shame for needing these.  In no particular order…

-NO You can’t actually watch porn.

-You get most of the items from clicking them in the convenience store owned by the French Canadian chick.

-No, you can’t see anyone naked.

-You get the deed to the truck inside Truck’s truck.  You get there by having the sheep escort you to the jail.  Once there, press B to exit and choose “exit to parking lot” off the menu.  Search the seat to get the deed.  You can also bend over so that I can wipe your ass for you, you lazy bastards.

-Once you have the deed, take it to the cop and she’ll sign it over to your girlfriend.  At this point, congratulations, you’ve beaten the game.  Or rather I just beat the game for you.

-No, you can’t go to the shopping mart, or any of the other buildings you see through the telescope except the jail.

-And finally, no, I don’t know what the fucking ending meant either.

Fluffy: Operation Overkill

Remember how fun the hoverbike sequence from Battletoads was?  Wait, you mean to tell me it was an exercise in futility?  That it was your childhood introduction to the rage quit?  That you would sooner have your pee-hole violated by rabid woodpecker than be reminded of it ever again?

Well I don’t think it looked that bad, but I do sympathize with all you poor souls that lived through it.  You see, I never actually played Battletoads. I just known of that level by reputation.  It also seemed to be the inspiration for the boss that ended my play time with Fluffy: Operation Overkill, the latest game picked out for me by my loving-caring-maybe a bit disturbing boyfriend Brian.

I’m not sure what’s up with Brian.  He seems so nice and salt-of-the-Earth most of the time.  And yet he picks out games like this or Bird Assassin for me.  We’ve never talked much about his childhood, but after these choices all I can picture is being raised in some kind of demented barn, being bullied by farm animals, and forming a blood vendetta against everything you would find in a petting zoo.

Fluffy is a side-scrolling shooter where you play as a spooky looking squirrel wearing a hazmat suit who is out to wipe out everything in the forest because they’re allegedly infected with some kind of virus.  I call bullshit on that one.  He looks like he’s just a bit too happy to massacre the cast of Open Season.    Maybe he was looking for an excuse, saw a rabbit sneeze or something and said “well fuck it, end of the world plague, let’s get armed.”  Either way, the only thing the game does have going for it is the sheer scale of violence on display.  When you shoot something, its guts spill out, heads going flying, and blood turns bodies of water red.  I’m sure this alone will be enough to lure in those hopeless torture porn losers who get hard whenever anything on-screen winces in pain.

Strip away the admittedly well done gore and all that’s left is one of the very worst games on the marketplace.  It all starts with the embarrassing controls.  The only option you’re given is to use the control stick.  Why this was done, I have no clue, since there’s nothing analog about it.  The slightest nudge of the stick sends Fluffy full speed ahead.  This would be okay if you could use the digital pad, but you can’t.  I can’t imagine how much this will suck for those saps with first-gen 360 controllers that always seem perma-stuck to the left.  I reckon it would render this game impossible.

The gameplay is completely lacking as well.  You can’t aim anywhere but straight ahead, so every action sequence is just taping the fire button and nothing more.  There are Atari 2600 games that offer more versatility.  Meanwhile, you have floaty jumps and bad collision detection that will leave you taking undeserved damage multiple times.  The first boss battle is a prime example.  You take on some kind of pig thingy that instakills you if you’re within farting distance of it.

And finally there was the Battletoads homage I mentioned above.  In this case, you’re running from a pig driving a combine harvester.  You’re forced to jump over various gates WHILE shooting moles that cling to your body.  The problem is the gates are too close together and your jumping is too slow and unresponsive.  I tried to beat it dozens of times, my blood pressure rising to dangerous levels.  I took a few breaks, until finally I had enough and rage quit.  I intended to go back to it later, only to find that the game had no auto-save and I would have to start over from the beginning.  Fuck that, and fuck Fluffy: Operation Overkill.  It’s a broken, botched, poorly developed piece of shit.  Sure, it looks good, but so does the hooker on the corner.  And like that hooker, Fluffy won’t leave you itching for more.  It will just leave you itchy.

Fluffy: Operation Overkill was developed by SO SO DEV Games

240 Microsoft Points thought a better name for them would be Sucky Crappy Sarcastic Airquote “DEV” Games in the making of this review.

Defy Gravity

Gravity Week continues at Indie Gamer Chick.  Well if you count Tuesday and Thursday as the entirety of the week.  On Tuesday it was Antipole which, despite technical issues, will likely land high on my Top 10 list this coming Monday.  Today it was Defy Gravity, an 80MSP title picked out by my boy toy Brian and developed by the dude who did Wiki Read.  Considering Brian’s last choice for me was Fluffy: Operation Overkill, which I’m currently on my third rage-quit for, I had set expectations low.  This was not helped when I thought the name “Paul Fisch” sounded ominously familiar, like a dentist’s voice when he starts a sentence with “are you sure you brush and floss your teeth every day?”

And so we have Defy Gravity, a fairly generic platformer with one twist: you can create gravitational fields.  There’s two kinds, one that sucks you in like a black hole and one that pushes you away.  Using these you have to clear gaps, climb tall towers, and avoid death by electroshock.  The physics for these thankfully work pretty good and the limited amount of levels do offer unique and interesting ways to use this ability.

The controls are a bit on a the complicated side.  You use the left trigger for push-away gravity and the right trigger for sucky gravity.  You can use their corresponding bumpers to remove the fields once you no longer need them.  It does get a bit hectic at times and keeping track of what all you have on-screen can be a bit of a mess.  It took me about ten minutes to get used to the control scheme, or as it turns out, about half the game.

Yes, it only took me about twenty minutes to finish Defy Gravity.  But at only $1 I can honestly say I had a pretty good time with it.  It also included the added bonus of hilariously timed comic deaths.  It’s not that the graphics are particularly funny.  They’re not at all.  In fact, they’re not even very good.  Instead, Defy Gravity is one of those games where you realize you’ve made a bad decision almost as soon as you make it.  Thankfully it never gets so hard that this turns from comedy to frustration.  And at twenty minutes things never get boring.  Sure, it takes half the game to get used to the controls but that’s no biggie.  I call it the “Resident Evil 3 Effect.”

Up next on Gravity Week: is gravity a conspiracy by “the man” to deprive skateboarders of working limbs?  Our investigative report.

Conclusion: yes, but anything that leads to them not breeding is a-okay with us.  Gravity – is there anything it’s not good for?

Defy Gravity was developed by Paul Fisch

80 Microsoft Points used Star Crush to defeat Gravity Man in the making of this review.

Pixel Blocked!

Pixel Blocked! received a Second Chance with the Chick.  The gameplay for it has been radically altered.  Read both this review and the new to get the overall picture of the game.  Consider the Second Chance to be the definitive review of the game.

I’ll lay off of my “puzzle games belong on Xbox like a diabetic belongs at the Jelly Belly Factory tour” line just this once because the nearly two hours I spent with Pixel Blocked! were pretty fricken’ sweet.  It’s one of those games that feels familiar despite being totally unique.

In the case of Pixel Blocked, it plays like a cross between Nintendo’s Picross series and any of the many Sokoban clones out there.  You’re given a grid of blocks you can rotate at a 90° angle and a gun thingy that shoots more blocks.  The object is to fill in the missing blocks on the grid with nothing out-of-place.  The puzzles feature three different block types already in place in which to construct around.  Steel blocks are the easy ones to work with.  Magnet blocks grab any blocks that pass directly by them.  And finally crumble blocks break as soon as a block lands on them.

The above set a new record for most uses of the word “block” in a single paragraph.  Up yours, Lego people!

If you make a mistake, or you simply want to take a shortcut towards completing a puzzle, you’re given three missiles each round that can be used to destroy any non-steel blocks you want.  If you want to just breeze through the game, using missiles is the way to go.  If you want to challenge yourself, try going missile free.  All 180 puzzles can be beat without using them.  Every time I used one I felt like the game was shaking its head in disgust at me.

I actually had a really good time with Pixel Blocked!  It’s hard to find original concepts for puzzle games these days, and even harder to find ones that function correctly.  It does both.  It’s play mechanics are simple and realized without flaw.  There’s really only thirty different shaped puzzles here, each with six unique starting-variations.  When I saw this, I figured that once you knew how to solve one, you would know have to solve all its clones.  Thankfully that’s not the case at all.  I actually have to tip my non-existent hat to developer Daniel Truong for this very clever design.

I do have a few complaints, chief of which is the reward system.  You can earn three stars in each puzzle.  One for completing it, one for not using any missiles, and one for finishing under a designated time.  The problem is the target times seem pretty far-fetched to me.  Earning them isn’t necessary for progression, but I was getting annoyed at completing levels relatively quickly and still getting a frowney non-star to make me feel like a total ignoramus.  Probably another case of a developer losing grip on reality after getting too good at their own game.

I also didn’t care for the in-game music, which fails to have that catchy quality that good puzzle games practically need.  There is no option to mute it either, which is a very disappointing oversight.  The sound effects were well done but I had to skip out on them for the sake of my eardrums.  Having said that, I did enjoy the overall presentation.  The 8-bit visuals were a good choice and give Pixel Blocked! a retro charm.  The only thing I felt was lacking was some kind of indicator that a block you were shooting was going to land in a correct spot.  The designated spaces were marked with black boxes, which are not visible when you have the aiming cross-hairs on them.  So sometimes I would have to move around to see if the spot I was shooting at was part of the puzzle or a mistake waiting to happen.

Overall, I really enjoyed Pixel Blocked!  As is my personal rule with this genre, I have to recommend the portable Windows Phone 7 build if that’s an option.  No matter what version you get, you’re bound to have a pretty good time here.  Dare I say it, it’s one of the best new puzzle engines to come around in a decade.  Along with Star Ninja, it’s one of the few games that I’ve seen on the indie platform that I feel has mass-market appeal.  Pair it with a fitting license and it could do well.  How about Lucy van Pelt’s Pixel Blocked!  Get it?

You know, because she is always calling Charlie Brown a “blockhead.”  No?  Sigh, these final line jokes are tough to write.

Pixel Blocked was developed by Daniel Truong

80 Microsoft Points suffered writer’s block while coming up with the final joke in the making of this review.  Ha, writer’s block.  Get it?  Sigh.

Antipole

Antipole received a Second Chance with the Chick that noted the slowdown discussed in this review has been fixed.  Consider this article the Chick’s definitive review, but click here for her updated thoughts. 

UPDATE: Antipole is now 80 Microsoft Points ($1 USD)

When the guys at Saturnine Games asked me to review their latest title, the Catholic in me was like “Rock on!  Any game that sticks it to Pope Sidious is a-okay with me!”  And then I reread the title and realized its name was Antipole.  This was followed by me self-face-palming while I ponied up 400 points.

Antipole is in fact the first $5 game I’ve reviewed here at Indie Gamer Chick, so I admit I planned on holding it to a slightly more strict standard than others.  After seeing the still pictures, I thought “oh hip hip hooray, more generic running and shooting.”  Nothing about it looked particularly good.  I set my standards high, my expectations low, and braced myself for the worst.

As it turns out, Antipole is seriously fucking awesome.

Antipole is an action-platformer with a slight garnish of puzzle elements.  You control a dude who is running through a series of levels shooting at robots and hopping over spikes.  Been there, done that.  But what makes Antipole truly unique is that it’s one of the few Xbox Live Indie titles I’ve played to rely on a gimmick and have the gimmick work flawlessly.

In this case, you can reverse gravity by holding the right trigger.  Doing so will cause you and almost any enemies within range of you to reverse gravitational pull and float upwards.  You can use this ability to clear large gaps or offensively to defeat enemies.  This alone wouldn’t have been enough to make Antipole stand out in a very crowded marketplace full of platforming-shooters.  But designer Edward Di Geronimo Jr. and his team stayed ahead of the curve by introducing new and unique elements in nearly every one of the game’s twenty stages.

A platformer lives and dies on its play control, and Antipole is near flawless.  The jumping at first felt a little bit on the loose side, but I quickly adapted to it and learned that the mechanics work very well with the gravity abilities.  For the most part, every death I experienced was my own fault, robbing me of passing the buck to the game like the narcissistic bitch that I am.

In some levels, the strength of the default gravity changes, either being much heavier than normal or much lighter.  The first time it happened, I almost thought the game was broken.  Then I spotted a hopping robot that I had previously encountered being effected by the same forces.  Very smooth, Saturnine guys.  Good design choices are all over in Antipole.  The level layouts are all clever and provide new ways of using the gravity gimmick to its fullest potential.

Of course, I did have a few technical issues, which led to my open challenge to the XNA community regarding peer testing.  And right before that went to publication, the guys at Saturnine Games confirmed that they experienced the same problems as me, albeit in different spots in the game.  I’m told they will look closer into this and work on a fix.  Good enough for me.

Even taking into account those issues, Antipole is clearly one of the best games on the marketplace.  It strips out the bullshit and leaves us with innovative platforming at it’s very core.  It features good graphics and a really inspired soundtrack.  The concept is well realized, never being boring or tedious.  And there’s some awesome gaming homages in here, like a boss fight that will be familiar to fans of Super Metroid.  I don’t know where this will fall in my Top 10 once it’s patched, but rest assured that Antipole will gravitate towards the top.  Oh ho ho, he he he, God damn I’m such a wit.

Antipole was developed by Saturnine Games

400 Microsoft Points set off a firestorm of controversy in the making of this review.