There’s an amazing thrill to be had in running, and not just plain old vanilla running either; I’m talking about the kind of breakneck sensational speed that your reflexes can barely keep up with. You need look no further than the original Sonic the Hedgehog games for an example of how something so simple can captivate us. It was a game based around blazing speed, good level design, and solid platforming (insert Blast Processing joke here). As soon as Sega got away from the game’s core mechanic (run really fast!) gamers lost interest. The group from indie developer Run Jump Duck Entertainment seems to have taken this lesson to heart in their game Vertigo.
Vertigo is a bare-bones platforming racing game where the goal is to get to the end of a stage as fast as possible. You do this by chaining together power-ups throughout the stage which propel you faster and faster as you pick them up. The end result is your character turning into a human fireball moving at incredible velocities while you jump across rooftops, crash through the sides of buildings, and wall jump your way to the finish. The only enemies to speak of are time and your own reflexes, and controls are just as simple as the gameplay. Your left analog moves your character around and the A button makes you jump and activates power-ups. It’s a game literally anyone could pick up and play, although it takes some doing to master it.
Vertigo has a visual style very similar to a flash game: it’s not overly detailed, but it is crisp and fluid and gets the job done. Typically you’re moving so fast minute details would go to waste anyway! The single player experience in Vertigo takes place in the campaign mode. You’re an aspiring vertigo runner, and you go stage to stage establishing yourself by beating the times set by pro vertigo runners. There is also multiplayer in Vertigo, supporting up to four players. You can either duke it out in a free-for-all time trial, or take on the slightly more advanced checkpoint mode. There are six stages in Vertigo, unlocked in multiplayer by beating them in campaign (with a bonus seventh stage for getting gold in the campaign levels).
The only thing I would like to see done differently is to perhaps move activating power-ups to a trigger, because the unfortunate side-effect of having both game functions on the same button is that things can turn into a bit of a button-mashing fest, especially in multiplayer where not everyone may know the layout of a stage. All in all, it was a fun experience that taps into the primal thrill of speed and for 80 Microsoft Points you could do a lot worse than Vertigo.
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