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| | Genre: Arcade | | | Min OS X: 10.4 |
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Despite its home-grown production values and tantalizing but underdeveloped online features, Team Phobic's Electropy deserves kudos for isolating an unusual game mechanic and exploring its possibilities. The bulk of casual games seem to be puzzle based, and although these titles are often amusing, they can be derivative and homogeneous. Although Electropy likely qualifies as a casual game, it distinguishes itself by being more arcade-oriented, and by offering a play mechanic, which although not completely unique, is unusual and visceral. Electropy's central conceit is rather basic. It is a kind of 2D side-scroller. The player controls a craft that does not have a consistent propulsion source, but instead uses an extensible grappling wire to swing between objects. The goal is to reach the exit point in each of the sparse, open levels. Successfully completing a stage frequently involves avoiding hazards and precipitous drops, and it occasionally requires collecting tokens so that the exit will open. Power-ups—including boosters that provide a few moments of flight, shields that protect the craft from damage, and zoom lenses that provide a fuller view of the level—assist in this process. There seems to be a resurgent interest in games featuring wire swinging, as evinced by Capcom's recently announced eponymous sequel to the 1988 NES title Bionic Commando, as well as the graphical update of the original, Bionic Commando Rearmed. Although Electropy does not share these titles' scope nor their production values, it does have a similar physics-driven swinging mechanic at its core. Perhaps a more precise, though more obscure, analog is the Japanese game Umihara Kawase, which first appeared on the Super Famicom. This title featured a female protagonist who used a fishing line with surprisingly accurate physics to navigate 2D geometric levels. Electropy shares with this game a similar sparse level design and a mostly non-violent focus on using physics-driven swinging to reach exit points. It is refreshing to see game producers utilize the power of modern computer hardware to experiment with new ways to play. All of that horsepower is frequently leveraged to push graphical boundaries, with admittedly splendid results, but there is arguably less impetus to direct it toward new modes of simulation. Common game world enhancements, such as ragdoll physics, tend to complement gameplay by making the experience more engaging; however, although these enhancements augment the gameplay, they are not central to it. This is perhaps why titles that introduce unusual physical simulations at the core gameplay level—such as Valve's Portal and Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy—gain such notoriety for their innovation.
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