Airscape the Fall of Gravity attempts to one up the challenging platforming of Super Meat Boy with a game built around numerous deathtraps and no such thing as a dedicated floor. However in an attempt at making something different, the developers of Airscape messed with some core fundamentals of both platformer and camera design, to create a game that I literally can’t play anymore.
Fish out of Water:
The story of Airscape: the fall of Gravity is about a group of space octopuses who one day are kidnapped by robotic aliens and are forced to explore crazy worlds to find their family and get out. You start off playing as a yellow octopus, but over time you will unlock other colors with different abilities. The flow of each level is around getting to the exit while finding family members who are caught in stasis orbs hidden in the level. What makes the game different from traditional platformers is how gravity and the perception of the level works.
Each character has different abilities that will make the levels easier or harder depending on who you choose
As you move around a level, the camera will turn and tilt to reflect how the floors become walls or ceilings and back again. Hopping between different land masses will cause you to float over, like the gravity is pulling you.
Upping the challenge is that you only have one life and any damage from enemies will cause you to restart, but each level has checkpoints that can be activated multiple times to save your progress.
Each zone or group of levels has one level that requires you to find X number of family members to unlock; this unlocked level is a challenge zone where the reward is a new unlocked family member.
So far, Airscape: The Fall of Gravity sounds like the perfect evolution of Super Meat Boy’s formula, however for so many lofty ideas; things came crashing down to earth for me.
Calamari:
There are several problems with how the game plays and we’ll start with the big one for me. Unlike a traditional platformer, where the camera remains locked to the player and tracks them, Airscape’s camera constantly shifts around; either zooming in or out or the turning and tilting as mention. This in turn makes the game very nauseating to play and for anyone who gets dizzy easily, this is not the game for you. In fact, after spending 30 minutes of playing when I did my spotlight video, I got a massive migraine from the game and had to stop playing. You do have options to alter how the screen tilts and turns, but I don’t have it in me to experiment and risk getting another migraine.
The camera constantly tilts and turns as you play and makes for a very dizzying experience
The next problem has to do with how the camera actually shows the levels, and this actually goes back to the previous point. I noticed that the camera seems zoomed in way too often and there were times where I was hit by off screen enemies coming into view before I had a chance to respond.
There were also plenty of times where the game asks you to make leaps of faith: Where you must make a jump or get through a section without being able to see where you need to go at the offset. In response, this makes the game have a lot more trial and error nature to it compared to Super Meat Boy.
What makes Super Meat Boy work, was the fact that the camera was pulled out enough so that you could see the majority of the level or gamespace on a single screen. You never had to make leaps of faith and enemies and obstacles were in plain sight for the player to see. Now of course Super Meat Boy didn’t feature gravity tilting or affected levels which Airscape does, but Airscape doesn’t keep the camera in a standard position and this further adds to the dizziness.
You need to be careful with how you position your camera, as you want to show as much information as possible without any of it getting lost due to being too zoomed out. It feels like the camera is too attached to the gravity gimmick instead of being designed to properly show off the game.
Spinning:
Airscape: the Fall of Gravity tries to expand on the platformer genre, but ignores the foundation of a good camera system and it just dooms the game for me. I can’t recommend a game that I physically can’t play and for a game to bother me this bad compared to all the FPS I’ve played over the years says a lot. Make sure to watch my spotlight video to see if you can stand the camera system and tilting, as the game features interesting level design for people who can handle the tilt o whirl like aspect of it.
