Everyone in the mobile gaming industry knows that over-the-air multiplayer is no easy feat. Dropping, cheating, and glitching are difficult hurdles to overcome in any type of multiplayer game--and mobile developers who wish to delve into multiplayer must also confront the stultifying levels of latency that choke today's cellular networks. Many mobile games sidestep the problem of lag with the aid of turn-based play. This is an effective solution, to be sure, but Virginia-based Blue Ridge Games has taken a different approach. In fact, the company's new maze-running game, Momentum, actually turns the latency bug into a feature: Players are forced to plan their routes several seconds in advance, simultaneously trumping network lag and turning a simple Pac-Man rip into a predictive strategy game. There may not be much to Momentum's rudimentary premise, but its clever planning and multiplayer elements make for an unexpectedly engrossing experience.
Momentum's main goal is to provide an accessible multiplayer experience, so it stands to reason that the game itself is uncomplicated to a fault. You choose from one of 18 furry avatars, which range from frogs, turtles, and birds to aliens and dragons. Your character is plopped down in the middle of a randomly generated maze, along with five other similarly cute little entities. Everyone races to be the first to gather eight of the many coins that circulate lazily around the maze; after you collect the requisite eight, your door out of the labyrinth opens, and you can leave the numismatic nightmare behind. The first character to do so is the winner.
Navigating the maze requires some foresight, due to Momentum's rules for character encounters. If you run into anyone who's packing more coins than you, you'll receive a sound beat-down, lose a coin, and be dumped elsewhere in the maze. Interestingly, the same thing happens if you run into anyone while bearing a full rack of coins, regardless of their relative level of affluence or poverty. On the other hand, interaction with characters that share your coin level produces an elastic collision, sending each of you tromping away in the opposite direction with nobody the worse for it.
In Momentum, your ultimate success is predicated on your ability to skillfully predict where other characters are headed so that you can avoid them or snipe them as necessary. The trick is that you have to make all of your decisions well in advance. Momentum typically lets you choose your direction at an intersection several seconds before reaching it, conveniently creating a buffer for today's cellular networks, which usually ping between 1 and 1.5 seconds. Blue Ridge would rather you think about this delay in terms of the game's namesake: Your little creature builds up so much "momentum" that once he makes the decision to turn, there's no going back. Your character's near-term destiny is depicted by a blue line, which extends a certain distance to indicate its present path. Whenever the line approaches an intersection, a diamond appears and changes colors to red, counting down your time to make a decision; if you don't do so in time, your character will take the default path, indicated by a blue arrow.
This may sound like a strange way to play a maze-running game, but this system of visual indicators is very intuitive and helps to keep Momentum's predictive gameplay running smoothly. In addition, Momentum seems to function flawlessly over the network--even in play-fast mode, which roughly doubles the speed of gameplay. Momentum even has simple lobby functionality, so you can talk trash to your opponents in the pre- or postgame phases, or check up on their win/loss stats.
That said, you may not have all that much to talk about, because Momentum's gameplay doesn't get very deep if you aren't playing against mostly human opponents. The multiplayer game will fill up mazes as necessary with CPU players, but the AI will generally follow the path of least resistance and rarely perform any unexpected moves, so it's not much fun to outwit. This is part and parcel of Momentum's larger problem, which is an occasional lack of player efficacy. The game is essentially played out several seconds in advance, and you might not always have all the information you need to make an informed decision; therefore, playing successfully can sometimes involve more guesswork than strategy. It can be quite frustrating to see your thin green line dead-end at an intersection, victim to a lumbering teddy bear that just picked up an unexpected coin and is still five seconds away from a totally unavoidable collision. Momentum's smattering of power-ups, which include direction-reversal springs, shields, teleporters, and bombs, help to put some control back into your hands, but you must activate them in advance of an upcoming intersection. The resizable and movable radar window is more of a boon, as you can see every player's movement through the level at a glance, as well as determine the location of exit doors. Unfortunately, the radar is too small even on its biggest setting to give you any information on the layout of the maze itself, making it less useful than it could be.
Momentum's visuals and sounds are competent, although they're obviously designed to create an ancillary shell for the gameplay. The character sprites are very small, but they may generate a smile or two as they comically hop, skip, crawl, or flap through the homogeneous, green and yellow maze background. The sound effects aren't bad, mostly consisting of a few crisp boings and zooms to spice up collisions. Momentum's title music is a high-quality Asian pentatonic affair that will begin to drive you insane after about three loops. Turn it off.
Gaming via time delay is a dual-edged sword, but Momentum proves that it can be made to work successfully. Blue Ridge Games' solution is pretty seamless and very well designed, down to the included tutorial. In all, Momentum is one of the more innovative multiplayer games we've seen for the mobile platform, and it is definitely worth a try. Keep in mind, however, that playing multiplayer Momentum eats up your cellular minutes, so it may not be the best multiplayer value available.
