Cloudbuilt

+REP

Great piece

This is a great and underrated 3D platformer with awesome movement, physics and general identity. It's not the most spectacular and isn't for everyone, but you should really consider trying it! The main appeal of this game is the movement and controls. Controlling Demi here feels so good in almost every aspect. The wallrunning and climbing especially is fun because you have precise control on how you move on walls in this game. Once you get good, running across or jumping off walls will become as normal as moving on the ground and you'll be able to enter a state of just comfortably flowing around sections of the level. Your rocket gear allows you to boost around, but it's not to the point where you can just skip all of the level design. You'll have to manage your power meter to make sure you have enough to rocket boost or enough to climb up a wall. You'll have to carefully consider when you initiate a rocket boost because it depends on your velocity what effect rocketing will have. If you boost while you're just starting to jump, then you'll get a lot of height because of that strong initial upwards jumping force. If you're falling from a jump though, then instead of going upwards your rockets will push you downwards. It's momentum, your rockets multiply your speed and push you further in a direction instead of simply acting as moves that give you X amount of height or distance. This really allows for optimization of paths through levels and a fun showcase of one's skill. The levels consist of floating structures and ruins in the skies. You'll be doing parkouring across platforms, doing some wallrunning straightaways or a lot of climbing up tall tower segments. You'll also have to worry about robotic enemies of many types and forms that will hurt you and interrupt your movement. There are some gameplay changing aspects such as structures that give you infinite power, drain your power or bounce you, but admittedly they only get added near the end of the game so you'll mostly be doing the same parkour for the majority of it. The levels here are again not cakewalks allowing you to skip through them. You'll have to really experiment to find clever skips or exploits to cheese anything. With the DLC especially, this game can get brutally difficult. The level Desire for example which is part of the Defiance DLC set of levels took me 4 hours to beat. Luckily this game comes with a pretty forgiving respawn system that allows you to place your own checkpoints anywhere you want. You'll still need to learn the level enough though to do a good run and get higher rankings to unlock other levels. There are a lot of workshop levels to play. The level creator itself is pretty hard to comprehend but people have been able to make very unique playing levels with it, from challenge courses to legit entirely working Metroidvania levels somehow. A lot of them seem to be quite difficult or focused on one aspect of the game instead of playing like the majority of the levels from the main game though, which means that you'll probably have to really like this game to enjoy most of them. The premise of this game is that Demi is some sort of future soldier who gets severely injured and goes into an unconscious state. Every level is a dream of hers that represents something important. For most of the levels, you get dialogue from Demi regarding its meaning after you beat it. It's cool, but admittedly the dialogue seems too lengthy and I dislike how inexpressive the voice acting is, sounding the same for every line and every word. There are multiple endings for you to achieve through completing certain levels at the end of paths on the level map. Nothing that substantial comes from the endings though so I would say that the game lacks a satisfying conclusion. You'll just keep playing and unlocking levels until you see all the endings and are left with difficult challenges to beat. The art direction here is really pleasing. The effects they applied to the visuals I say makes this game not age porly even though it's from 2014. It still can look quite beautiful aesthetically. The design of Demi is also pretty cool in my opinion and you can unlock a ton of alt skins if you wanna change it. The music for this game is great and probably isn't like what you've heard before. It's not one of the best soundtracks ever made but it's definitely above the quality of just being okay or good. It's worth a listen even if you're not going to play the game. This is overall a worthwhile experience that doesn't seem to have been as successful as it probably deserved to be. You can wait for it to go on sale, but I personally would say it's worth the full-priced price-tag, especially because the devs are still updating it for some reason after all of these years.