The first thing that impressed me about Grid was that the character on the title screen reacts to your input. This is actually a really smart way to deliver tutorials, or at least parts of them. After all, the first thing the player wants to do when he or she starts up the game is select "play," so when pressing an arrow key causes some kind of action to occur on-screen, the player is going to want to toy around for a bit. From there, the player can teach himself or herself the basic mechanics of the game before the game even begins. I like this game already! Let's see how long that lasts...
Grid is my favorite kind of game to review. Playing it was a genuinely enjoyable experience, but there are still quite a few points of constructive criticism I have, so let's get started:
At parts, makes you play at its pace. I've spoken briefly about this before, and although it isn't a huge deal in this game, it's just very frustrating when the flow of a game is interrupted because you have to wait for a platform to move to just the right place. In fact, I would say that immersion is the concept this game grasps the least. That much is evident from the death sequences. First off, when you die, you stay dead for just long enough for it to get annoying. Second, it's way too easy to die. I attribute this mainly to the isometric viewpoint, which messes with my perception of where certain platforms reside. An isometric viewpoint isn't an inherently bad trait; Bastion is evidence enough of that. I think the reason it doesn't work too well in this game is that every block really only has one texture, so it's very difficult to determine where one begins and another one ends. The same thing can be applied to your hitbox. It's somewhat difficult to tell if moving a bit to the right will put you in a blue block's line of fire or not.
Of course, this isn't helped by the control issues. I think the main issue I have with the controls is that there's no way to change direction without moving. This would have been very helpful in those certain instances where moving one simple pixel in the wrong direction would leave me tumbling to my death.
The only other issue I had was that some sound effects are just too loud. It can be very obnoxious when you're having a grand old time platforming your way to glory when suddenly your ears blow out because you forgot to mute your computer before launching a red block into a blue block.
Other than all that, though, this game's intuitive mechanics, fluid and fun feel, and semi-appealing graphical style make it an enjoyable new toy.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay cubical.
Links
A Little Cube Finds His Way Home: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26006
