The Big Takeaway: Summer of Arcade continues on with a game featuring a heavy art styling infused with Metroidvania game play and creepy twin stick shooter vibe.
The Little Takeaway: Crappy controls, Way Too Short, Unintuitive Puzzles and Design. The art style becomes boring and uninspired with time.
Review:
In my review of Bastion a few weeks ago, I talked about those “indie” games that are heavy on atmosphere and art style, while the game attached to it suffered. Lo and behold, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet comes around and satisfies that gap in the Summer of Arcade.
Far from a bad game, it’s a diet Metroidvania genre trope-fest wherein you wander around the game space picking up increasingly more powerful weapons, shields and items. It supposed to be like an easy mode version of a Metroidvania, but I found that most of the difficulty came from unclear goals, incessant (often unnecessary) backtracking, and unintuitive controls.
The art style of the game is great and eye-catching from the beginning cinematic, but it quickly wears out its welcome. Even with the brief playtime, you pretty much see everything the game has to offer in the first hour.
The main problem with Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is the lack of game attached to all this fancy art style. Lacking a story, there’s no mortar to keep the game together if the game is going to lack the intuitive nature to keep you chugging along. There’s not enough power-ups to justify looking in every nook and cranny, and what there is to find is concept art and other tchotchkes that add nothing to the game itself.
The controls in this game are abysmal. The ship moves far too slow and it’s unclear how much damage your ship has taken or how much more you can take before exploding. The generous checkpoints are a decent band-aid to this problem, but giving me a life bar, or one that is clear enough to give me a heads up, could’ve gone a lot further. The weapon/item load out wheel is cumbersome and ridiculous in that you have to hold down the right bumper then use the right stick to select your weapon. Each face button can be used as a hot key for up to four weapons, but often times you’ll need to open up the weapon/item radial to just use a one off item. In the meantime the game does not pause! So, if you’re in the middle of something, namely being shot at with homing needles or trying to navigate a particular puzzle, you’ll probably wind up exploding. When pushing the “Back” button it brings up the world map. Which is great, and tells you where you need to go next. Now, you’d think that pushing the back button again would take you back to the main game. Nope. You go deeper into the menus when you push back again. When was the game designed? That’s completely ridiculous and unintuitive!
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is that one game in the Summer Arcade that’s purposely aimed at the same people that gobbled up Limbo last year, in theory this should’ve been a home run. However, what Limbo lacked in depth in more than made up for in its aesthetic, excellent puzzles and game play. Aside from a blistering excellent initial big bang of animation at the beginning, nothing about this game is inherently worth your time or money, especially at 1200 Microsoft Points ($15). I would even go so far as to say that 800 Microsoft Points ($10) is still asking too much. Definitely pick this up in one of those end of the year deals at Christmas time on XBOX Live.
Isanely Twisted Shadow Planet fails on every videogame trope it lays on the table: it’s a sluggish twin stick shooter, it lacks any of the depth and “just one more item to find” frenzy and joy of exploring found in a Metroidvania title, and it’s art aesthetic is limp-wristed, bland, and uninspired save the opening cinematic.
Final Verdict: Pass
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