Format: PC/Wii/PS2/PSP | Genre: Platform | Publisher: Oxygen | Developer: Twelve Games | Out now: £19.99

By Lewis Denby

Poor CID.  I’ve spent most of my time mindlessly smashing him head-first into walls.  It’s good that it’s a key mechanic in CID the Dummy, and that its animation is surprisingly satisfying, as it’s almost certainly what you’ll feel like doing a lot of the time – usually after he misses a straightforward jump, falls to his death via an invisible trapdoor, or shouts “Not such a dummy now, am I?” for the 18 billionth time.

He’s a crash test dummy, you see.  Bored of his mundane – and probably rather painful – day job, he finds his chance to prove his worth when a professor’s daughter is kidnapped by a pesky villain.  And – well – none of it makes much sense, or provides for anything more than a gimmicky backdrop for the equally tedious game at the fore.

//CID the dumb
First games from small-time developers are always tricky.  There’s a limited budget at your disposal, and not a whole lot of reputation to place you firmly in people’s good books before release.  The trick is to play to your strengths, find a niche and hit it hard, utilise your limited resources to create something engaging and intriguing.  CID’s niche is those who yearn for the side-scrolling action-platformers of the mid-nineties, but its imprecise mechanics, awful control system and lack of design knowledge hold it back.  Elsewhere, there’s little to maintain your attention.

The whole thing is just grossly unambitious.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re going to rehash a thousand old ideas, you’d better do them right.  If you don’t, you’ve a hell of a lot of catching up to do, and CID the Dummy doesn’t even seem to try.  It’s a clumsy amble from left to right, marred by frustration and boredom.  That it’s so messy would perhaps be forgivable if it weren’t so bland.

The fisticuffs provide for a welcome change of pace: there’s an odd sense of brutality to punching the various denizens of this world squarely in the face.  It never stretches past frantic button-mashing, and the less said about ranged combat the better. But it’s unremarkable fun.  It’s about as good as it gets.

It’s all needlessly archaic.  The shaky engine would have benefited from a little creative design; the clichéd story and characters could have been improved with a dash of personality.  But there’s none there.  Levels are empty, blocky and predictable.  Voice acting is at the level of the worst children’s television. It’s modest in its aims and substandard in its execution.

The final straw is the woeful optimisation, seemingly across the formats.  The resolution of the PC version is fixed and ugly, with unchangeable controls mapped exclusively to the keyboard – but you’re still told to scale along rails using the “move stick.”  And though we’ve not tried the Wii version, we’ve heard terrible tales of nunchuck-swinging nonsense that only serves to flail CID around wildly instead of performing the action required.

Ultimately, the satisfaction of punching things wears off, the frustration of being caught out by yet another instant-death trap kicks in, and CID’s crippling lack of creativity is all that remains on the mind.

3/10

What does this score mean?

I had to take a break between playing And Yet It Moves and writing this review. When I first started typing, immediately after completing this bizarre, puzzling platformer, I just couldn’t shake the fear that unless I pressed the up arrow immediately, all the words would fall catastrophically off the bottom of the screen. This is a game where submitting fully to its twisted rules is the only way to succeed, and removing yourself from its laws of motion is a decidedly tricky thing to do.

The premise is agreeably simple: it’s just gravity. Stuff falls down. But the levels sprawl out in all directions, and you have a powerful trick up your sleeve. Pressing the left arrow rotates the entire world by 90 degrees. Same for the right arrow, in the opposite direction. Pressing the up arrow inverts the whole image, so up becomes down and left becomes right. Whichever way the world is positioned, gravity remains consistent, your character remains upright, and falling too far means instant death.

It’s surprisingly difficult to get the hang of, but at some point towards the end of the first section, everything clicks. The rotation mechanics become second nature, and the focus becomes less about working out how to use these controls and more about how to utilise them to your advantage. Though cosmetically a side-scrolling platformer, it’s actually much closer to the puzzle delivery of Portal, where your velocity remains the same as you flip around the environment. You establish where you need to be, and the puzzle is in working out how to get there. If you fall too far, it’s instant death and back to the last checkpoint, so careful planning is essential to your success. Failing that, just jump in the air, button-mash the cursor keys, and hope for the best. The latter tactic worked at least twice for me.

And Yet It Moves is an incredibly frustrating game that manages to remain joyous and addictive, whether you’re bouncing your way to success or being sucked into the ether. While it’s immensely challenging, it’s almost always fair, and failure is usually your own fault rather than the game’s. There are a few segments that demand trial and error – not to mention a few traps that I’m sure are outright impossible to spot first time round – but thankfully these are few and far between. You learn the rules, and you play by them. It’s tightly designed stuff.

Puzzles develop into ingenious squabbles with wildlife, as you try to bounce a banana into the hands of an angry chimp, or coerce bats into flapping in the face of a prying iguana. They make for a welcome break from the chaotic platforming, though the real joy of And Yet It Moves is in just that: the terrifying, heart-in-mouth moment where, in a fit of exhaustion, you hit the left arrow instead of the right one, and watch everything fall into oblivion just inches away from the next checkpoint.

The real, crippling problem is a complete lack of context to anything. You traverse through a cave, a jungle, and a bizarre universe of colour. But you’re compelled by the desire to solve the next puzzle, rather than by any sort of narrative. It seems a shame, and a waste. The luscious, collaged art design and beautiful, swelling soundtrack are enough to melt the hearts of even the most macho of gamers, but they seem to lend themselves to a sequence of events with a little more narrative substance. It’s the missing link that would have propelled And Yet It Moves into the upper echelons of videogaming. With its release so close to Braid on the PC, it’s a stabbing disparity, an unwelcome exclusion that highlights the difference in class between these two comparable titles.

But, judged purely on the sheer exhilaration of flying around every which way, working out how to clear that next path or how to reach that next platform, And Yet It Moves can only be praised. The time trials in particular are heart-pounding experiences, where one wrong move means failing to improve on your elusive previous best. And, at just a couple of hours long, it never outstays its welcome – though the relatively high price for such a short game may be problematic for some. Though not at the head of its pack, there’s a lot to love about And Yet It Moves, and I defy anyone not to find themselves horrendously addicted within minutes.

5/10

The current generation of home consoles has provided us with games which are more cinematic, more beautiful and on a far grander scale than anything we’ve experienced before. With the exception of Nintendo’s efforts, however, one major thing that has been lacking thus far is originality. New ways to play which gamers have never imagined, let alone experienced, have been somewhat lacking, particularly on Sony’s console. That has now changed as Media Molecule have released one of the most original, unique and quite frankly wondrous titles of the year, if not the decade. Welcome to Little Big Planet.

If you haven’t played Little Big Planet it can be quite difficult to grasp just what exactly it is. Throughout the game’s development cycle I’ve been simultaneously excited by the hype, but also left feeling a little hollow, because I didn’t quite understand what I was excited about. On the surface this is a traditional 2D side-scrolling platform game. The reason this particular side scrolling platform game has gathered so much attention is because below that surface is an incredibly powerful level editing tool, which allows players to create just about anything they can imagine and then play it. And then share it. And then play it with others.

To begin with, however, there is the ready built game. You control a fully customisable sackboy (or girl) who must run, jump and swing their way from left to right in a similar fashion to the platform games we’ve known and loved since the 1980s. The worlds you visit are colourful and varied. From the vibrant African Savannah, awash with wildlife, to the frozen wastelands of the Arctic Tundra, all are beautifully presented and contain a great balance between tricky platforming and ingenious puzzles. The game is highly stylised, possessing the appearance of a children’s story book. It’s a style which never really leads to your breath being taken away, but it all looks fantastic and works incredibly well. There’s a good eight to ten hours or so of gameplay to be had just to reach the end of the main game, and replay value is very high, as you will want to revisit every single area in order to hunt out more collectables and stickers which can then be used when building your own levels, or just to customise those areas you’ve already visited.

Once you’ve had a play with the levels Media Molecule has created for you, it’s time to dive into the level editing tool for yourself. It should be noted that all of the levels and characters included in the main game have been created using the same tools at your disposal, so the level of scope and power at your fingertips can be quite daunting at first. To combat this there are a huge number of tutorial videos relating to just about every aspect of the creative process, which are very user-friendly and also quite enjoyable, due in no small part to their being narrated by Stephen Fry, whose warm and gentle tones add yet another layer of charm to the package – as well as a large spoonful of humour. Within a couple of hours you’ll find yourself quite happily building simple stages, and then you’ll begin to lose days and weeks refining them and concocting more devious tricks to challenge other players; and that is the next weapon of delight Little Big Planet’s arsenal.

When you’re satisfied that your creation is finished it can be published online for the world to enjoy and admire. The LBP community will then let you know how wonderful your level is or, more likely, they will let you know just what is wrong with it. Cue yet more days lost refining your work. Upon receiving your first positive comments, however, and once other players begin marking your design as a favourite, you’ll find a wonderfully warm and fuzzy feeling of satisfaction that is hard to imagine in any other video game. Feel free to search for the creations of ‘G-VideoDie’ and add / detract from any good feelings I’ve received thus far.

Should you not have been blessed with much imagination or creative abilities then you can find masses of inspiration by visiting content posted by other players. At the time of writing, the game has been available for around three weeks and the huge variety and high quality of levels available is astounding. From clever spoofs of other games such as Metal Gear Solid  and Ico,  to old-school-style side-scrolling shoot ‘em ups a la Gradius,  and even a fully functional calculator level that has to be seen to be believed, this really is the game that just keeps on giving.

Along with the hugely impressive editing tools, the other star of the show is the phenomenally well-built physics engine that keeps all of your creations in check, makes stone and metal satisfyingly solid and sponge soft and bouncy. Explosions within your worlds can be a chain reaction of pure carnage with yet more feelings of total contentment. This in turn, however, leads to the one downside to the game: control. Sackboy’s physics are almost too good, and as a result lose much of the subtleness and tight feeling of control we’ve become accustomed to over the years of playing through Super Mario Bros and all that followed. It’s by no means a deal-breaker, but can lead to some frustrating moments when precise jumping is required to avoid a fiery, instant death.

Control issues aside, however, this is a flawless package. It’s a game that offers players more depth and alternative ways to play than any so-called ‘sandbox’ title. In many ways, it truly does manage to go beyond the very description of a game. Little Big Planet is a creative tool, a community and a canvas of unlimited opportunity. But it’s also a game that has the potential to never end.

In any normal year, Media Molecule would be already writing their Game of the Year acceptance speech. 2008 has given us so many great moments that perhaps that would be somewhat premature. In the years to come, however, out of all the titles I’ve loved in the last twelve months, it’s Little Big Planet that will have changed the way people think about games, and in that respect it beats anything Rockstar or Bethesda have ever produced.

10/10
What does this score mean?