Full Bore
Developer: Whole Hog Games
Price: TBA
Platform: PC
Release Date: Spring (Late April/Early May)
Full Bore is a nifty little puzzle game where you play as a boar whose job it is to bore through things. Ok, there’s more to it than that but I really needed to hit my pun quota.
The story opens up with you accidentally crashing a rocket into the vault of a rich businessboar who then forces you to work in his mine to replenish the gems he think you stole. There’s very little story after that besides a few moments here and there, but you can find computer terminals that help fill in a bit of the backstory of the world. Eventually though things start to take a more sinister turn as miners start disappearing and you get transported to some lovecraftian type dimension. I only got to play through the first half of the game and it seemed to take a bit more of a story focus in its final moments so hopefully the second half delves more into the story stuff.
Unfortunately the game feels pretty aimless early on. You’re thrown into a pit and told to recover all the gems you allegedly stole but it isn’t until you find a certain character that you actually get an objective to progress further in the narrative. The gems themselves are merely collectibles along with the scattered pieces of background narrative. The other issue here is that there’s no indicator on the map or the menu on what or where your objective is when you eventually get one. An example of this is a character who challenges you to a race and tells you to return if you ever want to race again. Problem is that the levels are so big that I forgot where he was and now if I wanted to race him again I’d have to scour through the map to find him. I found that the best way to figure out where you need to go is to basically just hit up every area on the map going through every door until you reach the one you need.
Now Full Bore is a block pushing puzzle game. In it you’ll need to navigate the environment by figuring out how to position blocks in the right way for you to proceed. Your boar can also dig through certain blocks that are next to, above, or below him or her and there’s also a stomp you can perform to cause fragile blocks to collapse. The game slowly introduces new block types as you play and it’s up to you to figure out how use your knowledge of how all these blocks work to solve the puzzles. You’ll see blocks that form bridges, dust blocks that collapse when touched, colored blocks that will switch blocks of a similar color on or off, exploding blocks and more. There seems to be a decent variety but nothing you likely haven’t seen before in this type of game. What the game lacks in innovation it makes up for with puzzle difficulty because there are some damn tricky ones. There’s a real satisfaction when solving some of these crazy difficult puzzles and getting that “AH-HA!” moment.
Thankfully the game has a pretty forgiving rewind feature. Since you’ll be moving blocks all over the damn place you’ll likely find you screwed yourself over in a puzzle so a simple tap of the rewind button will allow you to either restart the room you’re in or take you back one move at a time. This helps keep things from getting too frustrating.
An interesting thing about the game is how it handles what puzzles are required and which you can easily skip. Each room is riddled with various puzzles but you’ll come across quite a few that are only required if you’re focusing on collecting gems; if you don’t care much for collectibles then you’re free to walk on by sometimes. The game also features a sort of open world that you can explore to find collectibles. The game also features a sort of metroidvania styled world in that you can freely go to any area in the map and backtrack at your leisure. There aren’t any areas locked behind doors requiring a new ability either; provided you can solve a room’s puzzle you can pretty much get almost anywhere whenever you want besides the few story related areas. The map will help show you where all these places connect to but it’s somewhat busy looking when you’ve unlocked most of the rooms in an area and the images of the areas in map view don’t really help you.
Now since the rest of the game won’t be out until later this spring I’m not sure how different it’ll be to the build I played but I’m hoping the story is delved into more since it actually seems kinda neat in a goofy way. Fans of platformers or puzzle games might want to keep an eye out for this when it releases because while it doesn’t do anything radically different from every other block pushing puzzle game out there, it’s seems to be solid enough and has charm. The first half of Full Bore is currently available (purchasing it will get you both parts) with the full game releasing later in April.
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for Full Bore.
