Velocity 2X is a hybrid game, a fusion of a shoot ’em up and an action game. It’s the sort of game that sounds really good; a literal Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup sort of situation. In practice, well… you’ll see.
As it turns out, this game is a sequel. I have no idea what the previous game was like, so I essentially went into this one tabula rasa. You play as Lt. Kai Tana (oh God, the Highlander 2 flashback is kicking in), who awakes from some sort of stasis to find that aliens have turned her into a cyborg to keep her alive. You’d expect this to be the sort of thing that has dramatic ramifications on her life or something, but it’s only ever mentioned in passing once or twice after the early chapters explaining the changes are done. The scientists rebuilt her, incorporating some of the technology from her ship so that she’d be better than she was before; better, stronger, faster. Most of the rest of the story boils down to her fucking up the warlike aliens that are the overlords of the scientist slave race she befriends.
Her ship, you see, was a prototype; it was loaded with a crazy ability to warp over short distances. This allows you to get through walls both while piloting the ship and on foot. This mechanic is fundamentally the crux of the game, as it is indispensable. You are often expected to do this on the fly (more on that later), and it is absolutely necessary to defeat Vokh guards in the on foot segments.
And this is where the problem comes in. It’s hard not to feel that the game as a whole would have benefited from picking one genre and sticking to it. The game includes a number of upgrades for both the ship and personal equipment doled out in story sequences, and some of them are almost worthless in comparison to others. The shot upgrades for your ship and the rifle upgrades are nearly worthless, as they have far less combat utility than the bombs and the cannon, respectively. While the shot upgrades can only travel towards the top of the screen, you can fire bombs in all four cardinal directions; if you have the controls mapped for it, you can literally rotate the left control stick to inflict a 360 of death on any enemy ships or turrets. The rifle, on the other hand, fires in the direction you’re facing and only has two things going for it: it can be fired while dashing, and each shot deals more damage than a single cannon shot. Unfortunately, the cannon is literally a flurry of plasma shots that can be aimed in eight directions, meaning that you’ll only use the rifle when strictly necessary.
Hooray! This upgrade is mostly worthless.
Which brings me to the controls. They’re ridiculous.
Every time I thought I had everything mapped out well in Joy2Key, I would find out that some new thing I just got would not work with the setup. Telepods are the worst offender of the lot; aside from being unbelievably difficult to throw in the first place (and the ricochet shots they expect you to make with them can and will kill your time bonus), I had to remap them several times to realize that the mechanic really is awful. You don’t really expect this sort of thing from a game that was actually on a console and therefore had to have reasonable controller setups. I’m not sure if this was due to my old Logitech or not, however, but it was something of a damper.
The game looks fairly nice. Everything ran smoothly, and the spritework is clean. While I feel that the level design for on foot sections was somewhat lacking in places, its far from the worst ever. Also, all of the glowy effects are quite pretty.
Just expect to see this exact vertical setup. Often.
Every level has a set of scores it expects you to achieve, each with three levels of completion. Time, rescues, crystals and points each have a amount of XP they give out based on how well you did in each. XP is used to unlock levels further in the game. While you may want to 100% each level, it’s not necessary, as you only need around 8000 XP to unlock the final level. That is easily done without too much effort; as long as you collect all of the escape pods, crystals, and kill every enemy you come across in the fastest time you possibly can, you’ll have no problem.
Placing escape pods behind breakable glass feels a bit much, doesn’t it?
The game has a pumping electronic soundtrack. You probably know whether you’ll like it already. It’s good, but I don’t think it will exactly lodge itself in your skull for the next few days or anything. Sound effects are fairly pleasing as well, so make of that what you will.
Finally, I feel the need to note that, at least in my case, there were some crazy hitbox shenanigans going on. Often I would watch projectiles pass harmlessly through me, only to suddenly hurt me once they reached the edge of the screen. Other times, I would move into an area through which a bullet had passed and, once again, get hit when said bullet neared the edge of the screen. This happened both in ship and on foot. I don’t know whether this was just the game not playing nice with my rig, or an oversight on the part of the developer, but it was the cause of frequent, time wasting deaths. To be fair though, I couldn’t find anyone else complaining of the problem.
In conclusion, Velocity 2X may well be your game. It might not. You can probably tell from the trailer if you’ll like it or not. It would, however, be good to keep in mind that the game is about seven hours long beginning to end.
Title: Velocity 2X
Developer: FuturLab
Publisher: Sierra
Platform: PC
Price: $19.99
A copy was privided for review
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