A specimen of extremes where I found myself at times having fun and other times being unbelievably frustrated.
The story is pretty standard. Vexx is a little guy given a special weapon of choice, and is sent out to free a broken world from evil forces, bla bla bla, last hope, yadda yadda yadda.
The weapon you're given is a set of claw laden gauntlets. The gloves offer a limited number of melee combos for attacking foes. You can also shoot a ball of energy from them, but for some reason you can only shoot it downward after you've jumped in the air. This is unless you collect enough energy from fallen adversaries, in which case you get a few seconds where you can shoot energy while on the ground. Sadly there are no new combos, no new weapons, and no weapon, character or health upgrades of any kind available. So when the tougher enemies come around, it will just take longer to take them out, and the difficulty of more lengthy and enemy filled areas just gets compounded.
But this game really isn't about the combat. It's about the platforming. The level design itself is well done. There's lots of places in each world to visit, with a mix of both challenging and relaxed areas to traverse. Along the way you'll find ropes to climb, crevices to bounce jump up, spinning platforms to cross, spikes to avoid, and moving objects to out manoeuvre. There's lots packed into the various worlds to keep things interesting. The developers also allowed the impossible to happen, like walking into a column of water which you can then swim up to reach a spot of air in the middle, and then jump up to the next column of water above you.
There's levels where you move yourself into paintings, and it turns into a 2D platformer. There's devices where you can control the time of day, which not only impacts how deadly the monsters are but will also open portals placed each world.
You'll also find a couple spots where you get either a suit of molten rock which will let you break own certain containers, or a set of wings to access certain areas. These new powers are only active for a limited time for you to get to where you need to go.
There are also mini-games where you'll play against shadow-like versions of yourself to get a high score. There's stages that take place underwater, in the jungle, on snow capped mountains, in deserts, forests, temples and caves.
There's even one area where you'll enter a giant cube with an Escher-like set of stairs and platforms. Depending on which side of the cube you entered you'll be able to access certain areas of the room. These are the stages that show the great creativity behind the minds of the designers.
But creativeness with the environments is not the issue. The clunky controls is what can make it hard to manoeuvre around landscapes. The lack of refinement proves navigation to be difficult in tight areas, and to make sure your attacks are going in the direction you'd like.
And the biggest hurdle to getting where you need to go is the camera. It has a mind of it's own. Sometimes you can move it, sometimes you can't. At the most inconvenient times it will suddenly and unexpectedly change perspectives. Sometimes it will get stuck behind objects when you have to see what's going on. Sometimes it just picks the least helpful angles. It's also inconsistent. Usually when a game moves the camera on you, you can expect it to move the same way each time when you get to that spot. Not with this game. Every now and then if you're redoing an area (as you most definitely will), it will decide to give you a different, even less helpful angle than before. This makes it even harder to practice technique, because the direction you're pushing the analog stick to move is dependent on the direction of this camera with a multiple personality disorder.
The absence of check points makes death by camera and controls even less bearable. There's one level for example where you have to activate 3 switches. If you activate 2, then die, you have to start all over. There's one area where you have to activate 4 switches. If you activate 3, and then just leave the area and come back they've all reset. And with the huge structures that there are to navigate, if you make it to the final level on top, and then fall to your death, it gets very disheartening to know you have to start all over.
There's also points where you feel like there's some trial and error to be done so you know how to get by. This is not a good quality to have when you want to experiment but know that if you're wrong you're going to be sent back to the beginning with one less life.
Yes, there is a life system; but since there are no check points, it's not like losing a life is all that different from just reloading your game. And since those extra lives that are spread out in the worlds re-spawn, there's really no point to having this system at all, except to make you run around having to recollect more extra lives should you happen to die. Pointless.
It all adds to this feeling of artificial game lengthening. This is also apparent when you come across missions that can be nothing more than "Do you what you did for this mission, but when you get near the end, instead of going right, go left." It's a trait that feels cheap.
The worlds, the puzzles, and the level design is all great. It's just a shame that it was buried under such items of frustration, which overshadowed much of the enjoyment that I should have been allowed to experience. There's too much repetition and trial-by-fire required to allow the bright spots to shine through. When the dust settled, I simply didn't feel like I had fun with the game.