Addicting gameplay not cooled down by mediocre visuals

Download Igneous at igneousgame.com .

I haven’t had so much fun playing a video game in a long time like I had with Igneous. Repetitive and unchallenging gameplay against the same monotonous band of evil doers who never seem to catch a hint has grown stale. I want something that’s fresh baked and straight from the oven and that’s exactly what Igneous is. Using its own engine built by four students attending DigiPen, Igneous serves up a piping hot slice of some good ol’ fashioned fun.

As a tiny tiki totem (basically you’re a cube with a face) you’re magically awakened in the belly of an angry volcano.

You play the game as a tiny tiki totem (Basically a cube with a face) who's awakened inside the belly of an angry volcano.

Obviously a volcano is a very hazardous work environment for a tiny tiki and your goal is to simply escape unscathed. Jumping over treacherous traverses, avoiding fiery balls of molten rock, speeding over shaky ground that threatens to collapse; the volcano god wants less than to add you to his molten horde.

Technically, the models and textures in-game are of pretty low quality. Normal maps look like they were sourced from images of the Grand Canyon, blocky cubes where you would expect smooth surfaces, strange specular highlights that make everything feel like cheap plastic, horrendously stretched textures, it’s all here. Its programmer art at its finest yet this won’t matter one bit, and is seriously one of the only gripes I have with the game. Considering that the game was built from the ground up, I can live with the mediocre models. You’ll barely have time to think about let alone study them anyway.

Beyond that, Igneous is freaking awesome and still quite the visual treat. What it lacks in textures, it more than makes up for in grand showmanship with lots of awesome particle effects. Huge explosions shower you in flaming boulders as crumbling pillars fall all round you; the very ground you roll on falls from under you, each stone melting into the lava pit below; there’s even GINORMOUS lasers! There is hardly a moment when your screen won’t be filled with action yet not once did the game slow down or lag out, keeping you fully immersed in this hellish world.

Maneuvering past all these treacherous obstacles is made easy with simple yet responsive controls. Using the usual W-A-S-D setup and the spacebar to jump, the tiki totem can turn on a dime and traverse the widest of gaps. You move fast like The Flash or Sonic on steroids, but the controls keep right up with you. Jumping sudden pitfalls and avoiding falling debris, which won’t hurt you but will slow you down, is limited only by the players own reaction time. As an added bonus, the tiki totem is able to jump off of any surface it touches, whether it be horizontal or vertical, falling or stationary, making for some action packed jumping sequences, dashing from one falling block to the next in a desperate attempt to save myself from a fiery end.

The pacing of the game is quite fast; the tiki totem flies like the wind and the tight paths and hairy jumps serve only to enhance your sense of speed. The pounding tribal drumbeat works well to this effect.

While Igneous has stunning visuals and plenty of fantastic destruction occurring at any given second, it can sometimes become a bit distracting.

With so much mayhem occurring all around you, one of the hardest challenges is keeping the totem in your line of sight. While the camera itself works perfectly, the sheer amount of debris flying all over the place can block your vision, making it easy to fly your totem straight off a cliff. It doesn’t happen too often which is surprising given the amount of destruction that occurs on screen and won’t completely hinder your gameplay. Still, there were more than a few times when I would jump only to miss my landing zone thanks to a flying chunk blocking my view.

Igneous is awesome. A heart pounding game that ends all too abruptly after only 3 levels. Turning the difficulty up to impossible will certainly add a few hours onto the game and as addicting as it is, I found myself repeating the same levels over and over because I had so much fun trying to beat them.

Hopefully this game gets sponsored or the team decides to add more levels because I would love to give them a whirl. Try it out for yourself and I know that you’ll be hungry for more.

Review by Smith

score
out of 5