This year’s Xbox Live House Party kicks off with Warp. Your first moments of Warp will be begin with you, an alien creature, waking up on Earth. No explanation of how you got there is given. All you know is that you’re being hauled off by humans; down to a secret lab in the ocean to be experimented on. Your power is stripped from you, but you do get your power back shortly and that’s when the game really begins.
If you couldn’t tell by the title of the game, your primary power is warping (or teleporting) from place to place. Security is pretty tight in this facility, so for the most part you will be warping through walls, doors, and vents to get around. You can also warp inside of objects such as canisters, computers, power cells, gun turrets, and even people.
As you progress through the game you will pick up additional abilities. Echo lets you create a non-tangible version of yourself that can walk through walls and be used as a decoy. Later, that ability gets upgraded further with Swap which allows you to instantly swap places with an object using Echo. Lastly, there’s Launch which allows you to fling an object you are inside in any direction.
While controlling an echo is easy, I did have my issues with warping and launching. You have a reticule that shows you in what direction you’re going to warp or launch , but sometimes it was a little off. When I would launch some items they may veer left or right a bit. This may not seem like a big deal but a lot of the scenarios in the game require precision, and it can be extremely annoying to die because your warp was slightly off or a launched object didn’t go where it was supposed to.
You can further enhance your abilities with upgrades obtained by using grubs found around the lab. Some grubs are pretty easy to get but most will require extra effort. None of the upgrades you buy with grubs are necessary to complete the game but they definitely make it easier. There are upgrades that affect each power; If you’re trying to be stealthy, you may want to purchase the upgrades that make your movement and warping inaudible. On the other hand, you may want to buy upgrades that beef up your echo so you can stun guards. Your choice depending on how you play.
Your character is a small guy, so stealth is your friend. Going head to head with a guard, turret, or laser beam will mean instant death. You can warp inside of objects to hide while danger passes, but if a guard sees you warp into a canister he won’t hesitate to destroy it. Also, if you warp into a human and a guard walks up on you, he will notice something is off and kill the human, which means you die too. You can always launch an object at a guard to stun him, but if you want to completely eliminate the threat you only have one option: frag ’em.
While inside of an object you can cause enough friction for that object to explode. This includes humans, and it’s marvelous. The easiest way to paint a room red is to frag human. If you want to make it a bit worse, warp inside of a human, make an echo, and then swap an object inside of that human. One word: satisfying. As much fun as it is to take revenge on scientists, you will also use frag as a puzzle solving technique; power cells that control doors and other obstacles must be destroyed with these explosions. There are scenarios where scientists will try to sound an alarm if they see you. If you frag the security computer before they sound the alarm, there will be no one to come to their rescue.
Warp is as much of a puzzle game as it is a game that relies on speed and reflexes. Some rooms may have you using your powers to move objects to different positions, navigating your way through laser-filled mazes, or trying to find a way to make it past some pit or other hazard. Other rooms will have you using speed and reflexes to get past obstacles, tricking guards into shooting each other, or launching a barrel across the room so you can swap to it just in time to avoid being killed by something else.
While the game does bring a welcome challenge, sometimes it can be downright frustrating. I mentioned the clumsy aiming earlier, but when you combine that with the near instant death you receive by being in a guard’s or turret’s line of sight, it can be enough to make you want to turn the game off at times. Some of the laser puzzles are very tight-knit and even the smallest mistake will mean death. I can deal with dying due to a mistake I actually made, but when a mistake occurs because the warp was a little off, it puts a frown on my face.
To add to that, every time you die the game has to reload from the previous checkpoint. The checkpoints are abundant but the time it takes to load is what becomes frustrating. As you are trying to figure out certain scenarios, you will die a lot. The added frustration of the long load time associated with each death can be a turn off. The final sequence of the game is truly a death machine and if I wasn’t reviewing the game for Mash Those Buttons, I may have just turned it off and forgotten about it over time. The developer should have seen this as more frustrating than challenging and addressed the issue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking for an easier game; I just want controls tweaked and the reloading of the game to be minimized.
I did run into a few bugs, some of which halted my progress. I had not one, but two instances where doors that were supposed to be open for me were closed. One time it fixed itself when I died, another time I had to go all the way back to a certain area before returning to find it magically opened. Another glaring issue was a platform that moved back and forth during the final sequence of the game. The problem was the difficulty to time the platform because it moved sporadically, and at any given moment may or may not have used its full range of motion.
While there is a lot to explore, sometimes if you return to an area you will find that you may not be able to get back into certain rooms because, due to blowing something up or moving an object, you no longer can swap or warp in. For a game that is supposed to be open, this discourages back tracking. If you are the type of player that enjoys picking up all of the collectables in a game, make sure that you get what you can while you can in case you can’t get back to that room.
Despite its shortcomings, however, I did find Warp enjoyable for the most part. If you enjoy a challenge and can bare a little frustration from time to time, Warp offers a good action puzzle game. The cost of entry is only $10 so I thought it was worth it. This is Trapdoor’s first game and I think it shows a lot of promise. If they tweak it in a few places, I don’t see why Warp couldn’t make a great franchise.
