Warp was the first game released in the 2012 XBLA House Part promotion. Warp is a clever play on the puzzle game genre and attempts to be one of the premier puzzle games on XBLA.
In Warp you play as Zero, a helpless alien who has been abducted by humans for use of experimentation. It’s not long after your first experiment that you decide to make a run for it with a guiding voice sending you long the way. This voice helps you learn your abilities as well as leads you through the immense facility you’re trapped in always trying to get you out. After you reclaim your ability to to warp along a small space you set out on escaping and trying to contact and maybe rescue any aliens you find along the way.
The game is paced very well. You’ll spend the first two levels just learning how to hone your warping skills. You’ll learn to warp through walls, frag items or enemies among other skills that Zero has. Fragging an item is simply warping into it and basically making that item or enemy explode. This becomes and addiction as you play through the game. You find that you seem to be making everything that is around you blow up. That’s just the fun you have with Zero, there are more elements about this game that makes it fun. The enemy AI is superb in a we’ll kill each other way. The enemies are really quick to see you. As you try to sneak around the facility when an enemy sees you they will fire. With zero it’s one shot one kill. When you master your warping skills you find yourself having all sorts of fun like warping in between 2 guards to warp away so they will shoot each other. You’ll also find that if you look around you may find some unlockable challenge maps that further teaches you Zero’s abilities. It’s the small things like this that make warp stick out from the crowd and gives it that originality.
The game is littered with your typical puzzles that you expect to find in a puzzle game. For the most part all of the puzzles seem to be almost predictable. Oddly enough most of the puzzles would be hard to figure out if you had no warp ability. When you remember that you can warp most of the puzzles are simple and won’t hold you up for too long. The hardest areas in the game are when Zero is exposed to water as his abilities can’t work in water. Once again this just means you may have to go stealthy for a coupe of minutes to avoid any guards that may be lurking around.
Warp really won me over with it’s art style. There is nothing special about it. It’s done well and suits the game, but it seems very typical for the genre. I liked it a lot though as in my opinion the look and the sound of the game is really defined by the art style and all the sounds that you hear in the environments. The game does a good job of progressing you at a good pace and changing scenery so that nothing gets old quick. The controls are solid and seem to be something that pretty much anyone could pick up and play. But all of this being said, Warp still faces one problem that overpowers all of the good things that can be said for it.
The game in a whole is very middle of the road. There is nothing that stands out and makes you want to keep playing. Even the stuff that’s done great is still very mundane and average. It’s an original idea, but just can’t deliver on a game that makes you want to solve the puzzles that you come up against. Even in the character Zero, I still felt as he was very average and I really never cared for his well being as a protagonist. As fun as the game seems to be when first playing after a while it just gets a little old. Replay only exists in the unlockable challenge maps and that’s still a long shot. For the 800 MS point price that is being asked for Warp I would try the demo before making the buy.
