Sometimes you’ll have to ride on moving platforms, or jump across platforms which disappear – not tricky obstacles in themselves. Even the reassuringly energetic, pulsing techno music failed to stir me on at points. Some levels were so punishingly hard I really empathized with the plight of those forced into this sort of diabolical testing: I felt like a rabbit endlessly running in a cycle of frustrating death and rebirth. All I can say is: thank God that there’s no loading times when you restart each level. And one other thing: there’s no health bar in impulsion as everything that can kill you can kill you in one touch. So I was frantically trying to aim and shoot through each obstacle with less than a second’s interval between each, all while guiding my trajectory in mid-fall. To disarm the blue forcefields I had to fire my blue gun and to slow down the laser throwers, I needed my red gun. Then I was thrust into a nightmarishly tricky procession of wall-jumps before falling through a tiny passage full of deadly blue force fields and orange laser throwers. The evil overseer remarked that I’d be breaking records if I died fewer than twenty times before completing a particular level. You can also affix them to red patches on the walls, allowing you to rebound off them to reach higher spots.Īs the levels roll on, the complexity of jumpery and shootery required intensifies. Orange spheres slow down projectiles moving through them, making it much easier to pass by death-dealing laser dispensers. You can also use them to make moving obstacles pass by more quickly. At the most basic level, you can use blue spheres to increase your running speed and jumping velocity to get to more distant platforms. Anything passing through the blue sphere goes faster, while anything passing through the orange sphere goes slower. The rudiments of Impulsion lie in the two guns you wield: one shoots a blue force bolt which turns into a blue sphere when impacting with a surface and the other shoots an orange one with an identical effect. After the perfunctory plot is out of the way, you’ll get down to the nuts and bolts of Impulsion: running and jumping through a series of frantically paced levels. At this point the general premise isn’t even second-hand from Portal, it’s outright third-hand after Magnetic: Cage Closed. Impulsion places you in the role of a robot assigned to do endless tests for an inscrutable AI in a testing complex of indeterminate nature and location. If you thought Portal had too many physics puzzles and not enough infuriatingly difficult platforming sections then congrats, you’re Impulsion’s target audience.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |