FlippUp

A wonderfully worthy entry in the Foddian genre - a brutal climb with a unique mechanical spin and absolutely stellar visuals. Congrats to the dev team!

This a very tough game to review. I heavily debated giving this a thumbs down but after considering the amount of effort and charm that went into this game, I decided to give a very soft recommendation. Flippup is a rage game, so it is designed for you to easily lose progress and make you rage. However this game suffers from mechanics that push beyond that i feel. A lot of rage games I've played and enjoyed typically have difficult and sometimes outright unfair mechanics, but they are reliable. You're able to overcome them because eventually you learn the traps and tricks and with a little luck you can come out on top. Flippup manages to throw this out the window. Flippup is simple in the fact that you're in a giant vertical pinball machine and must climb to the top, and you only have to rely on 3 buttons, and very rarely a fourth. Unfortunately, the results of these simple mechanics are completely destroyed by unpredictable and unreliable feedback. The way the physics of the balls and the flippers are designed drive me nuts. You can eventually somewhat get a hang of them and get a flow going, but eventually it is going to absolutely ♥♥♥♥ you over, and you will be mad. This is all compounded by how surprisingly long this game is. This is The Return of the King: The Game basically. In that movie I thought it ended like 5 times. It's the same thing here, I thought I was at the end of the game like 5 different times, but it just kept going and going eventually becoming frustrating and overstaying its welcome. If I had to give this game a nickname, it would be Save Scum. Anyone who beats this game without save scumming is an absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lunatic and I respect you for it, but my God, the length x controls x punishment equation = pain. With all that being said, the aesthetic of the game is absolutely beautiful and each zone feels unique and hand crafted. There is a serious amount of work put into making this feel like a true adventure and when the game works, it really works. Nailing hard moments and reaching that new area able to breathe a sigh of relief almost makes it all worth it. This is a very hard game to recommend overall, even for people that enjoy rage games and don't mind major setbacks, this one sort of took the cake for me. I think part of me wants so much to like this game more than I did, but in the end I still had a fun time and I don't regret the time I spent with it. If I can suggest anything at all, it would be to play the demo and try to beat it. If you can get through it and you still are interested, then it's more or less a safe bet as long as you're up for a long haul. I hope to see more from this developer in the future where they can finesse their gameplay mechanics to be on par with their art and style.

checkpoints are a little mean, you can technically fall all the way to the bottom, but like, you wont. it will waste your time though a bit because of having to play some parts over and over. physics are weird cause they arent pinball, it's vertical

like the Wii controller, where we only needed to move our wrist, but we ended up swinging our whole arm about in frustration. Let’s make this clear from the outset, as it can be confusing: this is a platform game, not a pinball game, so – to put it this way – the ball ‘has to jump’. In fact, there are brief moments where a pinball machine is introduced, and you can clearly see the lightness achieved. That said, it’s less intense than Jump King, as it’s more compartmentalized, and it captures the feel of pinball nicely, especially during the jumps where we need to use the ball’s momentum to send it further. I think it’s a brilliant idea, and whilst I’m not sure if I’ll be able to progress, the fact that it’s less demanding means we can let the ball rest and try again another day. I’ll update the review if I manage to make it all the way to the end. Edit: I’ve done it! But I had to master the ball just like Maradona did with that orange.

You gonna hate yourself more than the game

Fun "Getting Over It" type game that ties in the old school pinball feels. I haven't quite beaten it, but I haven't experienced a fall so gut wrenching that it made me want to quit... yet.