Glitch is a game designed by a bunch of Digipen students. The project has been registered for the upcoming Independant Gaming Festival Awards. It is an action, shooter hybrid that is in the first person perspective.
It is similar to a game like Geometry Wars, yet, there is something unique about it. It offers a new and different experience and with a longer play through, you will realise it is not a Geometry Wars clone.
The game is a single player game that surprisingly offers a working level editor. The level editor is still a little rough around the edges and is in Beta, but thats a impressive feature for an indy game to sport. It has the regular options for resolution, sound levels etc.
The first thing you'll notice when the game loads up is that its stylistic 3D world. Stylistic in a blocky kind of way. A level is basically a huge cube and blocks rise up to shape how the level looks. What is even more interesting is that the level actually changes as you play. Platforms rise, the block you are on drops, the level changes shape while you are still playing it.
This adds to a very confusing and disorienting experience in the beginning as you a learning how to deal with this new level of challenge. Eventually you'll get used to it, and you learn how to use the moving platforms and high ground to your advantage.
The colours of the blocks changes too to track enemy movements, your movements, and the hit locations of your weapons. And again at first, the pulsating colours may be a tad bit disorienting, but once you learn how to use it yo your advantage, you begin to understand how the colours inform you of important little details like where your enemies are and such.
Its an eye opening eureka moment that players will have playing this game. The objective is to kill all the enemies in the level to progress to the next wave. You have the basic set of first person shooter weapons as well as a couple of more interesting ones.
You have weapons that are shotgun like, a rocket launcher, a claw gun(that is like a sub machine gun), grenade gun and more out of this world weapons like the vacuum that literally sucks the enemies into it(the blocks get sucked in), and a column gun that when you fire, raises a column up from the floor.
You can only carry one weapon at a time and different enemies drop different weapons. You will know which enemy to take down when you are out of ammo and speaking of ammo, your weapons gets depleted pretty fast, so you must plan to pick up weapons that a lying on the ground from dead enemies. I found that because you can only carry one weapon at a time, you need to be aware of what you pick up. At times I accidently picked up a weapon I really didn't want because I didn't notice it behind me.
I also found that the rocket launcher and the grenade launcher was significantly better than the other weapons simply because of its stopping power. There is no point to use the other cooler weapons when you can do your job more effectively with these weapons. Weapon balancing is not quite perfect yet.
The game has its own combo system in place. I found this to be a very fun mechanic that is a great form of motivation to try to get the highest combo. For every 5 enemies you kill you get a 5 in a row combo. If you are hit by an enemy then your combo is broken. I've managed to reach a 35 in a row combo. The techno music beats to your combo succession and rightly amps up as your combo meter increases.
The enemies are varied and are made out of blocks(to keep with the visual style of the game). Each enemy has its own simplistic movement pattern that you must learn to anticipate in order to effectively play for perfection. The enemy movement is not as sophisticated as the enemy movement in Geometry Wars but because you have to manage movement in a 3D space, that is more of a blessing I suppose.
There are enemies that fly towards you, shoot lasers at you, bounce around randomly, and even enemies that raise a small platform as they roll around. As you progress with each wave, the game throws more of these at you and that significantly increases the level of challenge to keep your combo up and avoid all the enemies and its projectiles.
The game has certain boss stages that will have you go against a giant sphere that will attack you will many different projectile types. The bosses projectiles can change the shape of the level that will most probably put you in a dangerous zone near the boss(that does melee damage if it touches you). You need to keep on the move always.
I always jumped as I found that by jumping often,(like bunny hopping) I could just avoid enemies by chance. Using the rocket launcher, I had to constantly anticipate where the enemy will be and fire my shot while keeping on the move and bouncing around.
My best is reaching wave 17 and 35 enemies killed in a row combo. The game high score screen says my best as 17/25 which I assume means there are only 25 waves. But the level of challenge is quite high so it will probably take you a while to reach the end(altough I can't confirm this since I have not finished all levels, always keep dying at 17).
Glitch is a game that has a lot of potential to be fleshed out as a fuller experience. There are issues with weapons and what not but there is nothing quite like it. The flashing colours and pulsating beats may turn off some people but for everyone else, you should give it a try. Tell me what is you best combo and how far you can go.
Link : http://www.glitchgame.com/
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