Check out our review for Airscape: The Fall of Gravity. A gravity-shifting action platformer about an octopus, a dangerous world, and crazy physics.
Airscape: The fall of Gravity Review
Developed by a group of students from around the world Airscape: The Fall of Gravity is a fast-paced, quirky little platformer that puts its many skill based puzzles far ahead of its simple story.
You’ll begin Airscape: The Fall of Gravity as a tiny carefree octopus frolicing happily in its quiet underwater home alongside its octopus friends. Here players are introduced to the basics of the game’s free-flowing control system, using simple button presses to move forward or backwards while manouvering in almost any angle from a top down 2D perspective.
You are not allowed to get too comfortable however as soon after things go a bit crazy and all the poor octopi, bar your cute orange one, are transported to and trapped in strange and dangerous worlds and it’s up to you, the little orange octopus, to save them.
It is at this point that the core part of the game begins. You will find yourself on land for the first time which, compared to underwater movement, is far more restrictive allowing you to travel in a linear path much like in side-scrollers such as Sonic the Hedgehog. Water still allows for 360 degree movement and as such, soon players will find themselves jumping, swimming and floating between intersecting landscapes.
It’s not a simple matter of getting from point A to B either you’ll also need to save sea critters along the way held captive by your mechanical enemies and as such its only a matter of time before the game begins to introduce enemies and traps to impede you from doing this.
Things continue to escalate as the game progresses as you encounter various other types of enemies, traps, weapon turrets, mines, LASERS, the list goes on. When combined alongside the games gravity based puzzles and the mix of water and land plaforms things can get pretty tricky very quickly. The game forces you to take care with your actions as simply charging forward depending entirely on luck tends not to work out. Even if you do learn your lesson and take your time you’ll still find you have your fair share of deaths… there’s even an achievement for it.
In truth, death can get a little frustrating as sometimes the game physics and floaty control system cause some unexpected results and more often than not it’s at the most inopportune time. You’ll find the latter part of the game becomes an effort of patience rather than skill and for this reason a large chunk of gamers will lose interest long before reaching the games ending. Maybe those who enjoy the Dark Souls series will be unaffected by this aspect of the game though as “You Will Die” a lot.
If you have the time you can check out our gameplay video to see what we mean.
With all this in mind though Airscape: The Fall of Gravity is a challenging puzzle game that has a lot more to it than most other platform games out there. Those who stick with it to the end will be rewarded with an excellent ending and most probably a profound sense of relief.
