Genre: Arcade
Sub-genre: Rage
Platform: PC, iOS, Android
Released on: February 27, 2016
There's something about indie rage games that's always pissed me off. Yes, I know they're called rage games, they're 'supposed' to make people angry. Duuuuh! But that's now what gets on my nerves about them. I've always enjoyed games with hardcore level difficulty and incredibly difficult challenges that require a lot of skill to beat. What puts me off is how shallow and lazily designed most of them are. The average rage game seems to have at least 1 weeks worth of effort put into it. Sure they've made a perfectly functional game, but after a while of playing you see just how it was designed to give the illusion of depth by having some random level generator create an almost infinite amount of combinations per run. This makes for a lot developers taking advantage of this easy method of design to shortcut their way out of deeply thinking about how to add depth and interesting mechanics into their game.
Enter Hyper Flex, a pretty simple rage game that was probably made in two weeks. Now don't get me wrong, I loved Terry Cavanagh's Super Hexagon. It was an incredibly fun and incredibly challenging rage game that got me playing for hours when it was uploaded. And hell, that game probably took a lot less time to make. But what's really significant for me here is just how well thought out and designed the game was. The precision required to play the game was fair and it was presented in a chaotic yet simple style and it proved to me that simplicity can mean beauty.
Okay. . . there's not really much I can make a caption for is there?
The developer behind Hyper Flex obviously got a lot of inspiration from Super Hexagon. It even says in its GameJolt description page that it got ideas from VVVVVV, Pivvot, Super Hexagon and Impossible Game. Like Impossible game, the game is played with one button and just like VVVVVV you use this button to reverse gravity. Sounds very simple right? So why don't I like the game very much?
I think because when compared to Super Hexagon and Impossible Game, it's too easy and slow-paced. There's not a lot of precision involved unlike the other games. It feels like a wannabe. It really is just a game where you just keep moving forward until you either hit a wall or a spike. You can dodge them by reversing gravity. The game does not have a lot of original ideas of its own and it does get tiresome quickly. One particularly bad design choice is that you need to get 1000 points to unlock the next level (There are only two levels plus a bonus mystery). 1000 points is actually pretty difficult to get but considering how dull the game can become after a relatively short time of playing it can be pretty frustrating. But if you persist enough, you unlock the second level which feels like you're suddenly playing a 2D version of Boson-X.
There's even less to describe here? Uh. . .there's a score counter on the top-left corner.
This second level goes by way too fast for you to actually know when to properly hit the space key sometimes. This is much less precision and more just hoping that the Goddess of Fate will smile upon you. There's also an annoying choice of color scheme transitioning. The background-foreground scheme keeps looping from white-black to gray-gray to black-white and back. During the gray-gray part of the transition you literally can't see anything for a few milliseconds. It's not game-breaking but it's mildly annoying. You also need to get 1000 points in this level to unlock the final mystery content, which I surprisingly also managed to beat.
The mystery isn't really worth it so I'm just going to spoil it in this review because it's not like a lot of people are even going to be good enough to reach that point. The game just goes with the famous cake meme from Portal. Wonderful, just when I thought the game couldn't get any more original! Only in Portal, the cake joke was actually weaved into the game's plot whereas here there's a cake because 'indie game'. Duuuuh!
Hyper Flex is not a bad game. Let's just get that out of the way. I just didn't feel like it had enough unique ideas to be it's own thing but it's alright. I've certainly seen worse games with even less originality and effort and terrible design but for the most part, this is a game that's playable but not going to stand out among the sheer torrent of free indie games out there that are all clawing for people's attention.
OVERALL JUDGEMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment