First of all, don’t mistake The Escapist with The Escapist[b]s[/b]. The latter is a game about prison life while the first one is a tough platformer. Is it as brilliant as, say, Super Meat Boy or the Mario games, though ? Read on and let’s find out.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a story here but the goal is to escape with as much loots as you can, hence the title. Sometimes you can take your time, other times you have to be a bit quicker.
Making the comparison to Super Mario isn’t entirely fair, because in no way is this a true side-scrolling platformer. As a matter of fact, The Escapist can best be compared to Sonic. So Sonic meets Super Meat Boy. Sounds promising, doesn’t it ? Well… no.
The game fails to properly incorporate all of the elements that made these games great in the first place. Meat Boy had excellent level designs and tight controls and Sonic ran at high-speeds, but also still had some excellent controls for a game back then. So yeah, it all comes back to controls.
Your character can run pretty fast and by clicking your mouse can bounce/roll (Sonic reference here) into a direction of your choice. So the best way to get to the top when you’re standing between two walls is to just use the mouse and bounce your way up. Arrows will appear when you hold the mouse button so that you know which way you’ll go. Unfortunately, the controls are very unreliable and imprecise. There have been tens of times that I knew exactly how to complete a level but the game failed to do what I had in mind; the character continued to run at high speeds, flew off into a different direction or simply didn’t respond to my mouse click. Selecting a path for bouncing also takes too long, and that’s not a good sign for a game that also partially focuses on speed.
The fact that you only have one life didn’t help either. This game would’ve been much, much better if it used a health system. I know the goal of the developers is to create a hardcore platformer here, but it just doesn’t work for this game. Especially in levels that scroll upwards, and you have to be both precise and quick. In combination with the slow planning of your bounces you’ll be replaying levels more often than you should.
Coins can be found in every level and collecting them allows you to buy stuff from the shop to make things easier for you. It will let you jump higher or give you even more speed, but keep in mind that if you die all loot found in the level you were playing in will be reset. Again, I think this was a poor choice. You want people to improve, but if there are people that can’t continue because of the game or the person him-/herself than you should give them a choice to improve themselves. The shop might just help with this and by resetting the coins every time you die they’ll eventually won’t be able to complete the game. Unless maybe they put a whole lot of time in it. It’s obviously an entirely different story if a character can’t be upgraded and is already at its best.
The level design is very, very bland and lacks charm and personality. So far I’ve only seen an industrial and underground design but I hope that there’s more to see than that. This could use a lot of work.
Now, the game is definitely not just about the graphics but they do help to immerse people into a game. And this doesn’t cut it. Not for me, anyway.
The music reminded me of old school platformers, again like Mario and Sonic, but mixed with some sort of heist theme. This is actually pretty good.
There are 48 levels in total and I managed to get to around level 20 or so. This took me about 70 minutes I think. I can imagine the levels will only get harder so I can only conclude that this will take at least a couple of hours extra before you’re able to finish it. I think it’s more than enough gameplay for a game like this.
In the end I’m sad to say that The Escapist isn’t the platformer I hoped it would be. I actually hope it will escape your attention because there are so many other games out there that do a better job at being an old-school platformer.
If you have too much money, or you just like to collect games then I can imagine you’ll (eventually) pick this up. But to anyone else; wait for a sale !
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