The past few years have seen a resurgence in anti-games, with titles like There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension trying to shake off being a game even as you stubbornly try to find ways to play it; and Spoiler Alert, which tries to flip the game on its head by seeing you traverse from the final boss to the start of the game. The quality of these games have been been mixed, but all of them have been enjoyable due to the novelty of the premise alone.
Missing Features: 2D certainly has its heart in the right place with a great concept, but unfortunately it’s not enough to make the game even remotely fun to play.
Many thanks to QUByte Interactive for the review code.
MISSING GAMEPLAY
The game really does have an interesting premise: due to a loading error, almost all of the basic game components have been corrupted. You set off on your platforming journey to restore the missing components of the game. The concept alone implies that the game will have a pseudo-Metroidvania feel to it, and it does – albeit in a level based format.
Missing Features: 2D opens with a failed (and lengthy) loading screen and dumps you into the shoes of a big green rectangle as you traverse a bland, flat world with nothing but silence to accompany you. Not long after starting, you gain the ability to jump – and so begins the platforming. It gets off to a pretty rough start with some very basic vertical platforming where any error results in having to start all over again. One jump had me retry the section a few times in monotonous silence, leaving me with a sour first impression.
As you slowly collect gameplay mechanics, things get slightly more involved, but the platforming doesn’t really improve. Death spikes appear early on, but checkpoints don’t appear until the end of stage four, meaning that any death in these lengthy levels will send you right back to the start. There’s no death animation (yet), so dying causes everything to suddenly stop with no visual or audio feedback as the screen fades away. Many hazards come out of nowhere requiring you to act quickly, so all of this makes the experience more infuriating. One particularly annoying moment sees you navigating across painfully slow moving platforms whilst avoiding spikes – as you can imagine, deaths become a tedious and frustrating affair.
MISSING FUN
It’s not just the start of the game that is hard to play through, the whole implementation of the game’s gimmick is implemented poorly. Stripping away everything at first is fine, but the first couple of levels should have unlocked a lot of the essential components – like music, for example. Music and sound effects are quite important in a game; going through basic platforming challenges in pure silence only serves to make the experience mind-numbingly dull. Not only do you unlock these a third of the way through the game, but you have to find the individual music tracks partway through this level. That’s right, every level is in pure silence until (or unless) you find the music track. It’s such a bizarre design choice to make and I can’t imagine it’ll make people warm to the game. What’s ironic is that the music is one of the highlights of the game, so why they decided to hide it away for the majority of the time is baffling. To make matters worse, each level has 3 – 4 upgrades to find, and each one is accompanied by a loading screen, followed by a text box showing the console commands that are activating the feature. It’s a neat idea at first, but they last almost thirty seconds each time. I’d estimate that around twenty minutes is spent watching a damn progress bar. They really outstay their welcome after only a single level – especially as they’re unnecessary and aren’t really loading a damn thing. To make matters worse, objects and enemies are all missing sprites and animations; this results in more things that you have to collect, making it feel more like padding.
Visuals are serviceable for the most part, but not great. Again, hilariously, the backgrounds are missing until you unlock both the feature and find the individual level backgrounds within the stages themselves. The backgrounds are mostly pretty good, but the main issue with the visuals is that they don’t seem to be cohesive. The character is clearly intended to be 16 bit, whereas the enemies look slightly modern and more reminiscent of a cheap phone game. These enemies also pass through solid objects with a strange clipping effect. Nothing really seems to gel together and it looks a bit off. I know the game is a budget title, but it makes the game come across as being ‘cheap’. This cheapness is reinforced by numerous spelling errors throughout, with even one word being misspelled in different ways each time.
The problem with all of this is that at the foundation, even when everything comes together near the end, is that the game just isn’t fun. The level design results in sections that can be broken, or areas that seem to lead to nowhere and confuses the level scrolling, and feels more like a bad Super Mario Maker creation rather than something made with actual cohesive and thought-out level design. The platforming is bland at best, and annoying at worst. It throws in sudden traps and trolls that are impossible to react to, resulting in you having to restart lengthy sections again. Things take a turn for the worse from level 10, where gameplay suddenly takes a nosedive and difficulty takes a spike. These later levels frequently throw obnoxious platforming in your face with very few checkpoints to alleviate the pain. The final level takes this a stage further by having checkpoints that are broken, meaning you have to one shot the whole damn thing. The developer seems to be looking into a resolution for this, but this level still leaves a sour final impression regardless. The game culminates in a boss fight that not only comes out of nowhere, but is heavily inspired by a certain boss from a big Nintendo game. There’s no real way to defeat him, so you just have to avoid his attacks. This would be difficult if he didn’t continue his attack pattern even after your death. Whilst this annoyingly results in you dying before you even respawn, it also means that eventually he just stops and disappears with no fanfare. I found myself beating the game a mere second after one of my many respawns. A suitably anticlimactic and janky finale for this game, perhaps.
I went into Missing Features: 2D with reasonable expectations. I expected it to have a neat concept, competently executed, but not a masterpiece. What I ended up with was a tedious, underwhelming, and occasionally frustrating platformer that spoils the good premise it had. The budget price tag may tempt people into giving this a shot, but there are far better games out there for the same cheap price that offer a much more enjoyable experience.
Recent Comments