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Twin Sector

Score: 35%
ESRB: 12+
Publisher: Headup Games
Developer: DNS Development
Media: Download/1
Players: 1
Genre: Puzzle/ Platformer (3D)

Graphics & Sound:

No. No. No. No. No. If ever there was a game that exemplifies poor modern game design, Twin Sector would be the one. To be honest, I feel bad for some of the things that I have to say about Twin Sector. I know a lot of work goes into making games, even bad ones. But the harsh truth is that if you want to sell your product, you need to be able to compete with the market. It's not only economical, but common sense. Twin Sector simply can't compete with today's lineup of games from a technical perspective, but what's worse is that it fails from a design perspective as well.

There are tons of bad games that come out every single year that make Twin Sector look like a masterpiece by comparison, but the difference is that a lot of those games aren't meant for retail space. Whether they are student projects or just a way for the developer to gain more experience in the medium, they were never really meant to be shared with the world; only to a few people. So as an outsider to what I can only assume is a rushed independent project, I now have to judge this game against a standard that includes other games like Portal. (SPOILER: Twin Sector isn't even a fraction of the quality of Portal.)

So when I first booted up Twin Sector, I was kind of impressed with the five second splash page for the publisher: Headup Games. It looked cool, it had a nice style. The Main Menu appears and I start a new game. I wasn't ready for what I saw. It looked like high-end 3D special effects for a movie from the mid 1990's. The "people" consist of nearly one singular polygonal form with their clothes literally painted onto their skin. The animations are embarrassingly stiff and awkward. It was like watching a cinematic cut-scene from Diablo 1 circa 1997.

But even that isn't nearly as bad as the fact that the voice acting and dialogue are simply atrocious. If you are old enough to remember the voice talent of the original Resident Evil, then you have a pretty good idea of the quality level here. Bland, dull, boring and broken. Even the subtitles were not given the proper attention, varying wildly from lazy copy writing, to broken translated English. It was almost amusing at times to hear what one character was saying and to read the subtitles, following along as the two seldom match up.

Even if the voice acting wasn't that bad, the lack of any music or soundtrack makes the entire experience worse. You don't know how much you miss soft background music until it is gone and you are left listening to the repetitious sound of footsteps on steel, or the inexplicably loud hum of an abandoned military base. I normally don't put too much emphasis on a game's visual style, but after this, I realize it is important to present your game properly. Presentation is everything, and the presentation of Twin Sector is outdated and abysmal, which is oddly fitting.


Gameplay:

Twin Sector is a physics-based puzzle game. In first-person. With enemies. Ok, so it is a lot like Portal if you take away the portals. You play a woman named Ashley Simms who is frozen in cryogenic sleep and awakened for the purpose of... actually it isn't very clear as to why she was awakened. It just happens, then you are put through the trial of navigating a military research base that is on the fritz. Doors will be locked, keycards must be found, and alternate paths will be created. And you will be guided by a worrisome artificial intelligence that puts you in more danger than anyone else.

But don't worry! There is a novel navigation tool at your disposal that every level is designed around: energy gloves. Ashley is wearing a pair of energy gloves that help her to navigate her environment. Each glove has a different property and allows her to do different things. Her left glove (left-click) is used to pull objects to her and the right glove (right-click) is used to push objects away. So you can use those in tandem to traverse a tricky area or find the keycard you need from across the room. Honestly, this is the only positive thing I can say about Twin Sector: the core gameplay mechanic is a unique idea, but the execution of the novel gimmick completely ruins any attempt at good will.

So here is a scenario. You enter a room with a glass wall to your right and a locked door on your left. Inside the room on the other side of the glass wall is the keycard that opens the door to your left. The only way inside the glass room is through the air vent above it, just outside of jumping distance. So with the power of the energy gloves, you aim at ceiling above you in front of the air vent and use the left glove to pull yourself closer to the ceiling as you jump to reach the air vent. You get inside the air vent, but now you are twenty feet above the floor on the other side. So, using the right hand glove, you jump down and push against the floor which counteracts physics and you land a soft landing.

I took the time to describe an ideal scenario because that is how it is supposed to work in Twin Sector. It never works that way. I am going to assume the developers did not have enough time to fully bug test the physics engine because the core gameplay mechanic rarely works the way it was intended. The biggest problem is shoddy behavior amongst the objects in the world. What looks like a heavy steel case weighing roughly three to four times more than you do, bounces around the room like a beach ball when thrown against unbreakable glass. What's worse is that it is very easy to exploit this poor behavior. By standing on top of an object before you try to pick it up causes a gameplay bug that makes the object try to float in front of your face, but while you are standing on it, it continuously tries to get in front of you which makes it float higher and higher off the ground. Basically you can ride this anti gravity barrel anywhere you wish as long as you don't fall off. So most of the game becomes pointless after this exploit.

I had second thoughts about whether I would describe the technical difficulties I suffered while playing Twin Sector. I felt that it wasn't relevant to the review because I was trying to review the game itself and not the performance on my personal setup. But after many, many attempts to squash all problems I could see in an effort to minimize the chance of the fault laying on my PC, I realize that it is the game's programming code. Twin Sector is plagued with technical mistakes, bugs, glitches and poor scripting. There are too many to list, but the most frustrating is when the game crashes every single time you attempt to load a quicksave at the start of a new level. This type of poor workmanship is inexcusable and unacceptable. Bottom line.


Difficulty:

To be completely candid, the most difficult part of playing Twin Sector is being able to continue to play Twin Sector. Never in my gaming life have I been so disinterested and annoyed so quickly as I have with Twin Sector.

The auto-save system somehow randomly chooses a save file to load when you die. There are two save states at any given time: the actual checkpoint save and quicksaves. On many occasions after dying, I could not be sure which save it would load. Sometimes it would be the most recent save, which was convenient, other times it would be the furthest save of the two, not so convenient. So after spending ten minutes deciphering the room's puzzle (or more accurately, getting frustrated from poor collision detection on exploding barrels) if I died, I had no way of knowing whether I would revive next to a logical area of progression or restart the whole chamber.

Unfortunately, Twin Sector isn't hard in terms of standard difficulty. All of the puzzles can be easily solved after a few thoughtful seconds. The problem, however, is that it is very, very hard to understand where the puzzle begins and were the bad design ends. The worst example I can give is when I spent 15 minutes wandering back and forth through a brief area of the level trying to figure out what I had missed, because a door wouldn't open. I finally realized that what I was missing was a keycard that was arbitrarily placed on the floor at the end of a dead end hallway. That's bad design.


Game Mechanics:

Aside from the crashing and the glitchy gameplay, even the most basic of tasks is frustratingly annoying. Walking from one area to another simply isn't convenient. I'm not saying moving from place to place should be "fun" in games, but it most certainly shouldn't be a chore. Twin Sector uses a run speed that I would describe as a slow walk, and then if you want to walk more slowly by holding [Shift], it becomes a tedious crawl. There simply shouldn't be any problems regarding one of the most basic features of any game. I won't resort to inflammatory remarks about the developers' motivations, but there should have been so much more time put into this game before it was released.

It is a shame, really. There is potential in the title. The core gamelpay mechanic of using the gloves to manipulate the surrounding environment has a great opportunity to deliver unique puzzles and situations, but the potential is squandered from either over-ambitious development or a rushed production.

The ONLY reason I would recommend this game is if someone wanted to see the gloves in action, but even then a simple quip like "It's like Half-Life 2's gravity gun, but in gloves" would glean all that was necessary to form an impression.

I like to think I am very forgiving when it comes to bad games. I still say Deadly Premonition might be my favorite game so far this year, even though I gave it a score of 52 out 100. But Twin Sector is most definitely the worst I have played all year. I don't take pleasure in awarding that title, but the inept design coupled with crippling system crashes and glitches makes Twin Sector the worst value proposition I can think of in recent memory.


-HanChi, GameVortex Communications
AKA Matt Hanchey

Minimum System Requirements:



Windows Vista(sp2 +) or Windows XP(sp3 +),Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz or similar AMD Processor, 1GB RAM, DirectX 9.0c Graphics adapter, 128MB Shadermodel 2.0 NVIDIA Geforce 6600 or ATI Radeon 9600, DirectX 9.0c compatible Soundcard, 8 GB free disk space
 

Test System:



Windows Vista, 3.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, DVD Drive, 500 GB Hard Drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT

Related Links:



Windows Clover: A Curious Tale Microsoft Xbox 360 Connect 4x4

 
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