Warp

By Rainbird 27th Feb 2012 | 3,374 views 

However, the game can often stall to load for a few seconds, which is unfortunately somewhat jarring, and takes away from the overall experience. And while the voice acting is pretty good, you'll start to hear the same lines repeated too often later on in the game, which also breaks the atmosphere. Trapdoor deserves some extra credit for the voice acting though. Despite having only three different voices in the game - one for guards, one for scientists and one for the commander of the facility - hearing the same voices doesn't get repetitive and actually works well. It serves a purpose in gameplay, too, because it helps distinguish between nearby character types.

The gameplay is imaginative. Our little martian is outfitted with various powers throughout the course of the game, with warping being the essential mechanic. It's a short ranged form of teleportation, that allows you to both cross doors and walls, and also destroy items and enemies by warping inside of them and blowing them up. The game has been built to make warping as useful as possible, and the pace with which you receive new powers to mix the gameplay up feels natural and gives a good sense of flow to your progression. The powers you gain later on feel imaginative too. Unfortunately, there is a problem.

Remember the initial impression that promised a game of pain and suffering? It's back, and you're the one the game is after. Warp can be incredibly frustrating, to the point where it starts showing a sadistic side. The game does this mainly through the powers you collect. Most of these powers are too inflexible to allow for effective results without a lot of trial and error if you don't stay completely focused on what's going on in the game. This quickly grows stale, especially because failure often leads to death and rarely in a way that feels fair to the player.

Trapdoor seems to have realized that players will spend a lot of time dying, and they've strewn checkpoints throughout the game to compensate, so death usually isn't a big setback. And for the first three quarters of the game, all this trial and error is annoying, but it's not a major hindrance. The difficulty keeps growing, though, and in the last quarter of the game your ability to stay calm and focused is directly proportional to how much enjoyment you will ultimately derive from it. So if Warp is frustrating you, take a break and come back later.

Despite this, the gameplay in Warp is solid. There are some clever puzzles, the game will make you feel accomplishment from discovering how mechanics work on your own, and it can make you feel clever and powerful when you manage to pull off a good maneuver. But the gameplay just rarely reaches its full potential, which is a real shame, because Warp has everything else going for it, with great ideas, presentation, and pricing.

All of the content can be completed in four to seven hours depending on your skill, your desire to find collectables, and your time with the challenge rooms included in the game. These are isolated rooms that contain small puzzles that you're trying to complete as quickly as you can. The challenge rooms are good fun, they have clever puzzles, and play to the strengths of the mechanics, but trying to improve your finishing time, which is what gets put on the leaderboards, can be frustrating due to the aforementioned limitations of the gameplay. As for the campaign, there isn't much incentive to come back for a second round.

If you're looking for something to play after a hectic day, I suggest looking at something other than Warp. But if it takes more than a dose of potential frustration to dissuade you from playing a charming and solid little adventure game, Warp should do you well.

This review is based on a digital copy of Warp for XBLA, provided by the publisher.