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For me the concerns began just in the tutorial as the game walks you through each character’s signature ability. Your blue unit can wall and double jump (more on that later), red is burly and has a powerful dash that can move objects and dispatch of enemies, green has a grapple for trying to get to hard-to-reach spots, and yellow can phase to become a sort of ghost to move through certain walls and floors. Using this combination of these abilities the idea is that you’ll work through levels full of puzzles and challenges alike. What I found playing the game is, I believe, why the idea of a difficult platformer mixed with the ability to toggle between characters isn’t normally attempted. To put it plainly, and it showed up even in the tutorial, switching and executing special moves in sequence between characters is awkward at best. Clicking between units you’ll need to make sure you’re switching in the right order and then you won’t just need to be worried about the timing of your one move, you’re working the original move, the transition, and then the second one all with precise timing. While in most situations you won’t need to do this specifically, the constant toggling when it would likely have been more efficient to simply have a single more capable character in the first place is questionable. To exacerbate the problems the controls and movement are both awkward. In particular the fact that when you do a double jump you switch between two different buttons is just needlessly complicated and awkward. Worse, the wall jump is also awkward at best. Throw in that your motion doesn’t feel refined and tight, more often it’s abrupt and clumsy. As a whole movement and execution in the game are more often your enemy than your friend. You can grit it out and get acclimated to the idiosyncrasies but when there are so many titles out there that do it right, where execution is precise and mistakes are on you, this game sticks out like a sore thumb. If you decide to stick with it there’s a challenging game to be had here, without a doubt, just I think it gets the formula wrong. While more and more titles have begun creating opportunities for more people to enjoy them by having approachable controls or toggles to move the degree of challenge up or down Unit 4 has doubled (or is that quadrupled) down on being tough because it can be, not so much because of great level design but because a big chunk of the battle is with the controls in the first place.
Justin Nation, Score:Bad [5.5]