Scrabble is the game of champions, you know. Not everyone can claim glorious victory by coming up with a word containing two of the most valuable letters in the alphabet. Thankfully, with the introduction of Vex, a platformer from Amazing Adam, we get both a fantastic running and jumping extravaganza and an easy way to introduce this three-letter 13-point bombshell into the world's collective vocabulary. No longer will those Vs wait for Vim! No longer will you simply use the X to make Ex! Vex offers you a chance to improve both your hand-eye coordination and your tile-board coordination. Move with the [WASD] or [arrow] keys. You've come to get down, so jump around with the [W] or [up] keys; your stickman has mad hops and is also able to walljump and grab ledges for that little extra boost. As for ground movement, once you've picked up some speed you can slide with the [S] or [down] keys.
You'll need all of this to avoid many of the nasty obstacles that will challenge you in Vex, such as spikes, smashing platforms and approximately ten thousand varieties of shuriken, all of which will kill you in one hit and send you back to a checkpoint flag. You can also swim in water when necessary. Your goal is to make it through various stages filled with traps that want nothing more than to see you dead. Unlike many similar platformers, Vex's goal isn't to frustrate the player. Checkpoints are liberally scattered throughout the levels, typically ensuring that you won't have to repeat tasks if you die (and you will.) Dying costs you valuable time that will cut down on your ranking, though, so a real master will the most efficient way through each stage. Regardless, with a little patience and focus, anyone can get through Vex... and once they do, it's off to the Level Editor to see if you can throw together a stage to stump the world! Perhaps one day custom Vex levels will overtake Scrabble as the game of champions.
The review says 5 levels, but there are actually 10 levels. (1 tutorial, 8 acts, 1 credits level)
It seems pretty good overall, but there are a couple of things that annoyed me about it, which similar games like SkullFace or Super Meat Boy got right.
First, the controls feel awkward. Its hard to pin down, but I have a distinct feeling of clumsiness that isn't present in most platformers. Some of it is circumstantial. For instance, one checkpoint was next to a cliff you had to slide down. if you die, you are spawned above the checkpoint, and when you try to fall down the shaft, you hit the wall, and you don't stick to it because you haven't actually landed yet.
Another issue is that properly getting through some parts feels more dependent on what position all the obstacles happen to be in when you get there rather than how you deal with them. Part of it is the clumsiness, your inertia is too high to actually react to them, and you need to have momentuem to get through them. So, you can be happily running through a level, then suddenly a buzzsaw drops out of nowhere and hits you because your timing was unlucky. The time limit accentuates this, as it is encouraging you to take it quickly, rather than be overly careful, so if you try yo get the gold, your performance may be very variable based on your luck. This was something that SMB and Skullface managed to pull off really well, the flow of the level brought you to the obstacles with the correct timing. They reset when you restart, so your timing between runs is consistent.
The combination of these two factors means that the flow to the game is poor, and that is what really detracted from the experience.
I just can't load the game
I'm sorry but isn't this just a ripoff of Exit Path?
I'm the worst at platformers but actually am making some progress in this one, so Mystify may be correct...
If you hit "Quit Act" and aren't paying enough attention you just end up right back in the act you're trying to leave...
Update