PROS
- Games looks great
- Has good sound
- Varying Levels
- Not your average indie game
CONS
- Many, many bugs
- Limited - No replay value
- Main character doesn't fit within the atmosphere
- Collection of batteries hinders game
TEC 3001 is a robot parkour game. Your goal is to go through all the levels and collect a minimum amount of batteries before being able to advance to the next level. The fun lies in overcoming all the obstacles in front of you by jumping, charging, and sliding your way past them to each checkpoint.
The game plays from a 3rd Person perspectiveve as you control a metallic, terminator-esque robot through the 21 game levels. The controls are pretty simple, A to jump, B to slide, Right Trigger to charge, and the analog stick to move him left and right. The controls themselves work pretty well and are pretty responsive within game as you overcome the massive amount of obstacles including hurdles, buildings, ramps, and the lot of it. Though they do mix things up a bit by giving you multiple paths to choose from, as well as adding in a Sky Diving section every so often, which it fun but has a major flaw, which is if you aren’t going a very specific speed, you can’t gather any of the batteries, and sometimes can’t even land without exploding. Though while surviving is important, your main goal is to collect batteries scattered along the levels, and this is that part of the game I didn’t like.
To advance to the next level, you need to complete the level, as well as gather a minimum number of batteries, I believe this really hinders the game because it forces you to focus on not just finishing the level, but making sure you gather batteries, if they took the batteries out and made your only focus getting to the end they really could’ve focused on level design more. The reason games such as Mirror’s Edge work so well, is because they focus on the parkour aspect of the game, which is choosing your path through the environment, which allows for much more interesting level design. The batteries hinder the game because not only does it simply make it not as fun, it hinders the amount of paths the developers can add because they need to make sure the player can gather enough batteries before reaching the end no matter what path they take. Having the player focus on simply getting to the end would not only make the experience more fun, it also would allow them to focus on the environments and level design more.
Now the environments are something that really makes this game shine, because they are awesome. The game has a very Tron like atmosphere, because everything glows, is based on geometry and just plain looks cool. I found the environments and levels never get too repetitive since through-out the levels you can run through “RGB Gates” which change the whole color-scheme of the level, which adds variety, and looks cool. Though you also have the option of choosing whatever color you prefer from the options menu. The actual items that populate the levels range from streams of circuits and binary, to tech looking palm trees, to animated “tubes” to colored lightning. For an Indie Game, this really sets the bar for graphics, because this Indie Game has the best graphics out of all Xbox Indie Games I have played.
The audio is also great; I’m not sure if there is a track for each level, but if there isn’t they are at least varied enough so that it won’t feel repetitive. All the tracks have a techno feel to them and one thing I personally like is how they are high quality loops that actually have bass, a lot of Indie Games that I’ve played have next to no bass, which makes my sound system sad, this on the other hand, has bass. The actual sound effects in the game sound fine but are nothing special. But even with the good audio, I still played most of the time with my own music; the game goes well with dubstep, FYI.
The games difficulty will remind you of Super Meat Boy but isn’t as painful as an experience due to Check Points, but the later stages will still take you many, many deaths before you complete them. I think the difficulty would be fine, if, like I said earlier, the gameplay wasn’t cut back by the batteries. But the difficulty isn’t helped by the third person view, which can really limit your ability to see ahead of you, as well as having some problems telling just how far away an obstacle really is.
Now on to the bugs….there are a lot of them, I’m not gonna lie. I believe the developers thought “Well, since we have a deadline and need to be out for the Summer Uprising, people will forgive us for having bugs!” which is complete, utter bullshit; I don’t care if you have a deadline, bugs are bugs. Essentially the game just need 2-3 weeks of extra polish, there are many occasions of me falling through the floor, hitting something I didn’t actually hit, not hitting something I should have, having Check Points which always lead me straight to death, and etc. I’m not going to list them all, but just know that there are a lot of bugs, and you will die from bugs many times as you play through.
So overall the game is a good looking bug nest, littered with bad design choices and problems, the concept is good, and if you can get past all the bugs you will still have a great time in an awesome atmosphere, but the lack of polish stops me from recommending this game to everyone, if you haven’t played Mirror’s Edge yet, just go play that, it’s much better.