Alteric

I noticed the mixed reviews before I bought the game on sale but decided to give it a chance and check it out. The idea behind the basic gameplay is good and so is the level design, but the implementation of the game mechanic is severely lacking. [list] [*]Your character controls poorly. It is not very responsive to input and it slips (it has inertia, which in itself is okay), but it does so inconsistently - sometimes it slips just a bit, sometimes quite a lot, and sometimes it would even slip a lot on an upwardly inclined plane! So I often found myself over- or undercompensating for the slipperiness and dying another cheap death. And when you are airborne you suddenly have no inertia, only when you are on solid ground. [*]Second, collision detection needs improvement. the hitboxes around certain enemies are so ridiculously large that you can actually die from them even when your character is located on the platform underneath the hazard - for instance, moving sawblades in the floor of certain platforms that do not visibly protrude from the ceiling underneath can still cause death when you are standing underneath the sawblade and jump close to the ceiling. [*]Third, the moving hazards do not reset to their starting position when you die, messing up the timing and rhythm of the level. In certain instances the timing gets so much off that the level becomes unbeatable until you die another time at just the right moment to get the timing of the hazards fixed. [*]And finally, when you switch back and forth between dimensions, the new hazards appear instantly but there is a pretty long delay for the existing hazards to disappear (I am thinking particularly about the lasers here). Some might say this is by design, but I think it is a poor choice to ramp up the difficulty. [/list] Conclusion: this game is hard because controlling your character is hard, not because of challenging level design.