Pulse Shift Reviews

finally game which is something different. Game design and graphic art are awesome, if you are looking for game where you don't must shoot from point A to the point B like a monkey and you want more from games, this is game for you. Its really relaxing and same time hard for your brain.

At least I got it for super cheap. I figured it wouldn't be so bad, but several bad design choices lead to a frustrating experience. The main gimmick is rotating, but it feels clunky. It's slow by default, but can be sped up with Control-clicks. The first person camera feels really distanced from your character. A physical body and feet would really help for jumping in first-person. Also requiring first-person jumps onto a single small tile that disappears at intervals, that's just bad. I may give Pulse Shift some more effort when I'm in the mood, but I'd recommend to avoid. It makes the mistakes of some of the worst first-person platformers, and throws in some new mistakes with the weird controls. Tab 3 times to save, what is that?

The idea behind the mechanics is cool: switching the gravity axis to find your way into a volumetric maze, that's neat. But there are a bunch of unpleasant problems: 1. slow jump, slow walk, slow everything. Your character is a snail that has as much control over its jump as you'd have over Superman 64. A platformer with a timer where you don't feel like walking around because it's too slow and unwieldy feels like a game that should be patched up. 2. arbitrary "fall damage". It feels as though the paths you can walk on are restricted, even though nothing visually says so. You'd use your physics bending powers to go to a platform, but your screen turns red, you hear a "argh" and it's a fail state. Why? Did I fall from too high? It didn't seem higher than the jump I made 2 seconds ago... 3. arbitrary controls. You don't have any control over the input. See, the game expects your brain to work similarly to its developper and associate "left button" to "go left", but mine associates "press left button" with "push from the left" (thus "go right"), so everytime I need to use these controls, I have to take 2seconds to think about which button I should press. You can figure it's frustrating as hell. These are all major complaints I have for now. Asking for a refund, but I'll keep watching out for patches and updates that would fix those issues.