Defy Gravity

Gravity Week continues at Indie Gamer Chick.  Well if you count Tuesday and Thursday as the entirety of the week.  On Tuesday it was Antipole which, despite technical issues, will likely land high on my Top 10 list this coming Monday.  Today it was Defy Gravity, an 80MSP title picked out by my boy toy Brian and developed by the dude who did Wiki Read.  Considering Brian’s last choice for me was Fluffy: Operation Overkill, which I’m currently on my third rage-quit for, I had set expectations low.  This was not helped when I thought the name “Paul Fisch” sounded ominously familiar, like a dentist’s voice when he starts a sentence with “are you sure you brush and floss your teeth every day?”

And so we have Defy Gravity, a fairly generic platformer with one twist: you can create gravitational fields.  There’s two kinds, one that sucks you in like a black hole and one that pushes you away.  Using these you have to clear gaps, climb tall towers, and avoid death by electroshock.  The physics for these thankfully work pretty good and the limited amount of levels do offer unique and interesting ways to use this ability.

The controls are a bit on a the complicated side.  You use the left trigger for push-away gravity and the right trigger for sucky gravity.  You can use their corresponding bumpers to remove the fields once you no longer need them.  It does get a bit hectic at times and keeping track of what all you have on-screen can be a bit of a mess.  It took me about ten minutes to get used to the control scheme, or as it turns out, about half the game.

Yes, it only took me about twenty minutes to finish Defy Gravity.  But at only $1 I can honestly say I had a pretty good time with it.  It also included the added bonus of hilariously timed comic deaths.  It’s not that the graphics are particularly funny.  They’re not at all.  In fact, they’re not even very good.  Instead, Defy Gravity is one of those games where you realize you’ve made a bad decision almost as soon as you make it.  Thankfully it never gets so hard that this turns from comedy to frustration.  And at twenty minutes things never get boring.  Sure, it takes half the game to get used to the controls but that’s no biggie.  I call it the “Resident Evil 3 Effect.”

Up next on Gravity Week: is gravity a conspiracy by “the man” to deprive skateboarders of working limbs?  Our investigative report.

Conclusion: yes, but anything that leads to them not breeding is a-okay with us.  Gravity – is there anything it’s not good for?

Defy Gravity was developed by Paul Fisch

80 Microsoft Points used Star Crush to defeat Gravity Man in the making of this review.