The Body Changer

I know I’ve talked about game feel before, but it keeps coming up as a key feature that games either nail down or let slip away. Your game can be as clever or beautiful or engaging as can be, but if it feels bad to play then none of that is going to matter. In the case of The Body Changer, it can’t really rely much on the former so it’s all the more damning that the latter isn’t up to par. I’m being rather hard on it here… it’s a neat idea for a game, just not one that pans out on any level. You’re going to have to pick bits of the story out of the utilitarian opening and extremely concise terminals everywhere, but you seem to be stationed on some water facility out in space. Something has infected the precious supply and turned it blood red, and it’s up to you to get the purifiers back on line and clean everything up. “You” won’t be doing it yourself, though, because in this version of the future you have SynBs, gormless cyborgs which you can control remotely. With their help, you’ll wade through pools of goo, seal pipes, blast corrupted ‘borgs, and maybe get to the bottom of this whole mess. The Body Changer is at least named appropriately, because most of your time is going to be spent switching between bodies with different abilities. Some are combat trained, some are shielded against the infection, and some are helpfully color-coded for the big people-sized switches they need to stand on to open doors. Opening doors is your primary concern when there aren’t monsters around, either by finding keycards, triggering switch sequences with your laser wristband thingy, or making good use of the aforementioned floor switches. Levels tend to be linear in how you progress through them to the purifiers but that’s going to include plenty of backtracking and opening side paths. That was where I started to sour on the gameplay, actually. Your first thirty minutes with the game will acclimate you to switching bodies, grabbing items, and interacting with useless terminals. You’ll get to a room where you take control of a combat SynB and gun down some zombie ‘borgs… and then get stuck. It turns out you need to take another body all the way back to the start of the tutorial to get a keycard to proceed. You’ll need to do some similar shuffling about in later areas too, with detours through three side rooms to get to the other side of a main room or runs back to the start of the level to open something with a new colored laser. I can see the attempt at a metroidvania-style world here but it just doesn’t work as designed. Backtracking is incredibly boring here, owing to the slow movement, extremely plain environments, and lack of compelling secrets. The environments are huge offenders here, barely reminiscent of actual, livable locations with their plain cel-shaded walls and complete lack of detail. The characters and items are not much better, looking like inflatable versions of Aeon Flux characters and moving in stiff, barely-animated strides. Items simply poof out of the air when you touch them, and ammo is represented in the world merely as 2D icons. Every time I sat down to play The Body Changer, I got an intense urge to do literally anything else after about fifteen minutes. It feels entirely too much like a game world, full of rigid facsimiles of people and rooms that serve no purpose beyond impeding progress. Why would you even have your door controls be giant laser-activated lights ten feet off the ground? I’m sure a lot of this is by design, considering the story about synthetic servitor beings and the dichotomy of purity and infection, but it doesn’t matter as long as the game simply feels bad to play. Even the menus are plain, badly-proportioned boxes that feel like placeholders. There’s a seed of a good idea buried in The Body Changer, but it would need a better, more polished game to bring it out. Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/audish#curation]curation page[/url]!

I got bored of this one fairly quickly.

It's not very interesting and there are better games to play. The graphics are rather poor and you get tired/bored with this look pretty quickly.

This game's pride is it's character switching system. Think of it as Lost Vikings in third person. You control several characters (mainly 2 or 3) each with a limited set of abilities and inventory, and need all of them to solve puzzles. But you can sometimes swap items (such as keycards) with other characters too. Combat feels okay, the weapons are a bit generic but work like expected. I also like the new arena modes that you unlock after completing the sectors, it intensifies the action element of the game. Overall, it's a solid mix of puzzles and action that has a lot of potential.

GRANDE ITALIA! 9,4/10 http://m07h3rfck3r.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/the-body-changer-quando-litalia-si-rimette-in-gioco-accesso-anticipato/

Portal-like puzzle game + Resident Evil-like TPS fights + Zelda-like progression. The puzzles are good and well-crafted throughout the game (except a couple that are unfortunately really badly designed). Level design is the best thing about the game with shortcuts very well placed and no misconception in all this complexity, the dev thought of everything. The game is really long, 10 hours for 10 levels which is appreciable for an indie game. On the bad side, fighting is meh, loadings are too long, running pace is too slow as you go back and forth seeking your way... and the game is plain ugly. But that's what you get when you're just an indie without a whole artistic team to design Aperture Laboratories and GlaDOS and Wheatley. :)) Overall a good game that I might suggest if you're hungry for puzzle games after Portal and Talos Principle.

Io ci ho giocato su Desura, il gioco merita. Si tratta di un puzzle/action game in terza persona con la possibilità di impersonare altri corpi con caratteristiche diverse al fine di superare insidie ambientali, trabocchetti e nemici. La grafica richiama il genere Borderland. Consigliato!

Excellent game, has some refreshing mechanics and pretty good graphics, also it is easy to run in pretty much any computer so I can easily recommend it to anyone!

The Body Changer est un jeu différent proposant un gameplay différent et pour une fois c'est intéressant ! Typiquement vous allez devoir jouer avec plusieurs personnages pour avancer dans les différents niveaux. Suivant les capacités de l'avatar que vous dirigez (The Body), vous pourrez attaquer ou déplacer différemment, vous permettant d'activer des switch ou débloquer des passages accessibles uniquement par d'autres "Body". Le style graphique est sympa, un cellshading avec un bon outlining, c'est très propre (pas d'aliasing degueux comme sur certains titres) et ça tourne bien, même sur des configurations modestes. L'univers est très SF, vous êtes dans l'espace, dans un vaisseau, avec plein de technologie autour de vous. Le contexte est donc tout aussi sympa.

TPS+パズル要素のあるゲーム。その名の通り、能力別のキャラの体を切り替えながら、１０のセクターをクリアして行く。ハード相当の難易度で16時間でクリア。 [h1] 戦闘について[/h1] 　戦闘は結構厳しく、HPの自動回復は無し。ただ撃つだけではダメで、弱点を見つけたり、近接攻撃や、部屋のギミックを使用して敵を倒さないと弾切れを起こしやすいです。セーブデータは30個以上履歴保存されるので詰むということは無いかもしれませんが、やり直すという可能性はあります。 [h1] パズルについて[/h1] 　物理演算を使った仕掛けや２～３体のキャラを同時進行で解いたりします。一度に動かせるキャラは１体なので、無防備な別キャラを敵から守るというパターンもあるので焦ります。PCキャラは体当たりをすれば物理演算の効いたオブジェは動かせますが、持ち上げることができないので、壁の隅にオブジェが移動してしまうと面倒なことになる面も。パズルの設定ミスで多少手順が省略できてしまった事もありました。 気になった点はドッジングが左右移動キー2回押しで発動するのでパズルの為に細かく移動してると誤動作することがありました。周囲が即死エリアの足場でドッジングが発動し、死ぬことがあったのでキーボマウスでプレイの方は気を付けるべきです。 [h1] バグ[/h1] 　バグも確認しており、このゲームは任意のセーブは無く、部屋の節目などでオートセーブされるのですが何かの拍子？でオートセーブが無効化され、メニューに戻るなり、ゲーム再起動しない限り、オートセーブが再開されません。 　後はスイッチなどのフラグ関係もセーブデータをロードをしてるとおかしくなり、見かけはスイッチがONだけど実はOFFだったりするバグもあるのでその場合も再起動などしましょう。 　ゲームに支障をきたすバグが残念ですが追い込まれながら敵を倒したりパズルを解いていくやりごたえはありましたし、クリア率0.25％な上に希少な実績ショーケースがこのゲームで埋まるほどだったので、プレイしてみてはいかがでしょうか。