This is one of “those” games. Look at my game time. 30 hours. But you can finish this game in 3. So why that many? Well…
Don’t get bamboozled like me, folks. When I started this game, I was expecting a more story oriented experience, just like the title suggests. But what I got is neither mainly focused on story nor uncle. How could I describe this in the easiest way possible? Imagine spider-man web slinging mechanics or Attack of Titan rope device, or OG Quake 2 grappling hook. Yeah, that's right, you swing in air to travel through vast, open levels, but in first person perspective, occasionally using super mario-like jumps and rocket boots. Now, imagine you doing this over a span of 5 different areas, from time to time engaging in simple, fragmented story bits, and voila! You will get “A Story About My Uncle”
So what is the most important part of games like this one? Controls and precision. You fly in the sky from one grapple point to another, you need to be sure that when you press a button, your character will do exactly what you want. Here it works… for the most of the part. While swinging and flying is in majority of cases satisfying, physics can be frustrating. For example, grabbing the ledge of some floating platform is always a gamble. Half of the time the momentum will catapult you upwards, the other half you will glitch into ground or bounce from the surface and fly in random directions. Speaking of glitching — on every level there are places where you can land and end up permanently stuck, like between rocks, trees, fences etc. You land in a spot like this and you cannot move, forever forced to watch your character's hands desperately swinging in the animation of falling. Only using grapple works, which is another can of worms, but more about that later.
Another problem is with boost jump. When you hold shift, “W” and r-click you can perform a big leap forward. It helps traverse big chunks of space and give additional edge during challenges. But here is the kicker — if you run on uneven terrain, it can glitch and not register properly, so you just fall from a cliff instead of jumping. Oh, what is, there was a tiny rock on your path when running? Too bad, boyo, go back to the previous checkpoint and try again. For me it was an endless source of frustration, it forced me to restart so, so many times…
Don’t get me wrong — when everything works, it is an enjoyable experience. I felt instant dopamine hits every time when performing flawless combination of swings and jumps, leaping through big chunks of level in mere seconds, perfectly landing in places where I want, but then it was felt so unfair when in last stretch of level I fall into pit because of some stupid mistake that should not happen due to weird glitches, that the only thing I want is to throw my keyboard through the window.
Okay, let’s talk about technicalities. The game run on Unreal Engine 3. It was released in 2014, twelve years ago, so every potato PC from last decade should run flawlessly, especially because graphics are not sophisticated, even when we compare it to similar titles from around the same year. Sometimes it's shown too much — while art direction is entirely subjective, the characters models and animation are not. They look like they're from some PS2 game. It's clearly an indie title. Fortunately, you interact with them only on a few occasions, so it's not a big deal.
What is a big deal is FOV. Thankfully developers understand their assignment and you can crank up that up to 120 units, which is a godsend game like this. However! They forgot to update your character hand model, which created this weird feeling, some sort of tunnel vision. You got the entire game world properly scaled, but then a big chunk of screen is occupied by an enormous, giant hand with a jumping device. Imagine when you put your hand close to your nose for the entire time, so it is always in your cone of vision. Yeah, sooner or later you will adapt to it, but holy hell, it's strange and out of place.
Now, let's get back to the beginning. If you want to play this game once and never touch it again, you will spend 3 hours max. But if you want to get all the achievements, you will waste a huge amount of time, mostly on grinding and memorizing paths in the levels. This is one of those games that you simply must brute force through. The real challenge is in your ability to memorize, not to be efficient. You try, try, try, try over again, cuss on glitches, use exploits and hope for the RNG to smile upon you.
The best example is from time challenges. You know the drill — you need to beat the level in a fixed amount of time to get a gold medal. The first area is designed to filter all weaklings and wanna be speedrunners. It took me three days, THREE days to beat the first level. The required time is so tight that you basically don’t have room for mistakes, plus you don’t have all your tools at your disposal. It was so rough and frustrating that at one point I was thinking about dropping this game entirely. Thankfully the rest four levels are much, much easier, but holy heck, that was tough one.
Aside from time challenges, you also have one with limited usage of grapple — this one is not that hard, but thanks to mentioned above inconsistency with boosted jumps can be frustrating — as well as one with no falling requirement. And this one… Imagine playing carefully in one area for twenty minutes just to fail randomly because you bounce off from some floating platform. What is more annoying, there is no reset button. Instead of starting over you need to press escape, go to the main menu, click over the splash screen, choose one menu, then next and wait for loading. It's no big deal when you reset once, but when you do this for the 50th or 60th time it is a bit frustrating.
And you know what? You cannot apply the same strategies to different challenges. What is working on time trials will not work on grapple or no-death. So, if you are a mediocre scrub like me, you will need to play one level at least five times — first playthrough, then looking for collectibles, then time trial, then grapple, then no-death. Technically, because practically one level had around 50-60 attempts to do all of this. Like, why am I doing this to myself? Why do I waste my life collecting virtual badges? Just so random dude on the internet accuses me of cheating? Look at the achievement distribution for this game — all of them float around 7%. Isn't this a bit suspicious?
Anyway, time for closure. You want to play this game once and forget? Don’t bother to buying this for full price, it is not worth it. Wait for a discount during one of the bigger sales. But if you want to add this to your completionist list, prepare for swearing, bashing your head on the wall and repeating, repeating, repeating….
Now. It's over. Go home or something.
