Traverser
Developer: Gatling Goat Studios
Price: $15
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a code for review
There are some games out there that begin with an interesting premise and do something great with it. Other games try to sell themselves on an interesting premise but do absolutely nothing with it and are practically indistinguishable from every other game that falls into this category. Despite a decent setup, Traverser is unfortunately one of those games that fall in the latter.
Things aren’t going very well for the people in the city of Brimstone. The sun has died which forces society to live underground and a company called the Raven Corporation is in charge of supplying air to citizens. Things are definitely super fishy over at Raven Corporation though and the game subtly hints at this by putting Raven Corporation posters and propaganda videos all over the place that definitely aren’t Orwellian in nature. If you somehow didn’t notice I was being sarcastic then you might not notice how awful the plot is in this game. I love these types of stories when they’re done well and it blows my mind that every developer out there continues to rip off the exact same plot structure from each other.
Suffice it to say, the story is incredibly bland and makes no attempts at doing something new with the theme they’re going for. You’ve likely played through this story countless times before and you shouldn’t expect something shockingly different here. It’s just so by the numbers that I even started getting annoyed at the game for wasting my time with something I’ve seen done a dozen times already. And do you want to know what you get for completing this nearly three hour epic? A slap in the face with a lame cliffhanger and cut to credits. Awesome.
If you thought the story was horrid let me tell you about the gameplay because damn is it bad. Traverser can be summed up as a series of insultingly easy gravity gun puzzles; the majority of which just involve you stacking stuff to reach something you need. It’s amazing how few actual puzzles there are in this game considering the countless examples they could have ripped off. You get this amazing gauntlet that lets you pick up objects and the majority of your time with it is spent stacking up boxes to reach a ledge. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an uninspired and forced gimmick in a game. It’s like the developers made this game and realized they had no sort of gameplay mechanic to engage the player with and decided to just toss a gravity gun in because why not. Now everyone loves a good gravity gun, but nobody likes it when it controls this poorly. Along with floaty movement controls in a platformer which is always awesome, the gravity gun itself just feels awful to use. It was sometimes hard to tell exactly how high or low an object I was lifting was and rotating objects is a complete pain in the ass. When playing a game I should always feel confident in my control of the game and when poor controls cause me to feel unsure about a movement I have to make then your game starts to fall apart.
The worst of it is the combat though. If the awful stealth segments cause you to alert a guard (or you’re forced to fight a rat or something) then you have to quickly pick something up and sort of swing it at them. The problem here is that swinging an item at an enemy is the most unwieldy thing ever. There’s no clear indication of how much of a swing you’ll need to stun an enemy and you’ll often get varied results. Getting caught might as well be a game over since you don’t have any good way of salvaging the situation. If the game instantly gave you a game over for getting caught, which I wouldn’t like but I can deal with, I’d be a lot more okay with it. Instead I’m given the hope that there’s some way to escape when the poor controls and lack of combat options stop me from doing so.
The Final Word
Piss poor controls, an insipid plot, and a ridiculously short length makes what could have been a neat game into a retread of things I’ve played many times before but better.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
