VVVVVV review

Recommended

by Rahul

I'm very annoyed about VVVVVV. VVVVVV has a historical significance since it came out almost a year before Super meat boy, anticipating the wave of hardcore platformers, these platforms games where one dies very often but where lives are infinite and where the repetition is avoided thanks to levels or very short gameplay segments. The originality of VVVVVV compared to other games of the genre rests first on its mode of displacement: Here you can not jump, but we can reverse the gravity of our character anytime as long as his feet rest on a support-so you can choose to "fall" the hero up or down. The concept is not new since metal storm on NES had exactly the same nearly 20 years ago, but in VVVVVV, the whole game is built around it and it exploits it strictly: metal storm was a run'n gun where you could jump and shoot the e nnemis, while here one cannot do neither. The progression of the game is special: one explores freely a maze of fixed screens that are interconnected as in Jet Set Willy, the classic released in 1984 on ZX Spectrum, which obviously served as inspiration to the game as can be seen in his style graphic, its surrealist enemies, the specific names or comments worn by certain screens, the "collection" aspect of the gameplay, the sadism of level design, etc. Unlike Jet Set Willy, however, the collection here is anecdotal (only twenty "tokens" to pick up that don't serve much) and the interconnected areas are globally empty and uninteresting, simply serving as a crossroads intermediate (or "hub") to access the true content of the game: five linear zones each containing a member of the hero's crew, the game concluding when the six members are finally reunited. Another difference with Jet Set Willy, of course, is that the game applies as we said the recipe of hardcore platformers: the lives are endless, we can save anytime, and there are checkpoints every ten meters, which counterbalances the diffi u of the game and allows you to progress regardless of the player's talents. All this is very effective and the level design has many very clever passages that exploit well the gimmick of the game, but VVVVVV presents several problems. First, as has been said, the areas that can be explored freely in VVVVVV are irrelevant, to the point where one wonders why they are there since they break the rhythm without bringing anything to the game. Then the difficulty is very uneven, with passages suddenly much tougher than others, some of which are particularly frustrating (a sequence of character escorts, in particular). To make things worse, the game also has many instances where, togting from screen to screen without scrolling, one suddenly falls on spikes without any way to predict them or avoid them-the game offers infinite lives, but some successes require not to lose more than a certain number of lives, and these deaths are therefore unacceptable. The graphic style "retro" is also very, very basic and purified: reference the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64, that's fine, but VVVVVV is rude even to compare the toy library of these two machines, and it would have been criticized on this point even if it was released in the years 1980. But the main problem of the game, which makes that I do not recommend it, is that VVVVVV is not accurate. Whatever his mode of control, one directs his character in strokes, as if the game was not fluid enough-it's striking when you compare VVVVVV to, for example, you have to win the game, both games being very similar, but the second being perfectly flui and benefiting from impeccable manoeuvrability. From there, for me, everything collapses like a castle of cards: the challenge of VVVVVV no longer makes much sense if one dies because of its vagueness... Since the game is stuffed with checkpoints and you can even activate a invincibility or play idle, it remains still playable and can be finished without problem, but the experience is generally unpleasant because of this major defect that adds to all the defects already mentioned. Instead of you buy VVVVVV (which by the way is expensive off promotion for what it is), instead play you have to win the game: the game is prettier, much more fluid and more manageable, it has a much fairer challenge, and it is free. (my time spent on the game is much less than what says steam, I usually let some games run in windowed mode by doing something else)