Review: Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is a difficult game to categorize. It centers around 2D Metroid-style exploration, but the game is not a platformer. Rather, you control a flying saucer, which means you can zoom around in all directions on the 2D plane. The game features roughly equal parts puzzle solving and multi-directional shooting. Some of the gadgets you pick up feature novel concepts, and the art style is definitely unique. Unfortunately, developer Shadow Planet Productions overlooked one serious design flaw. The game is just flat-out boring.

It’s not that ITSP is a bad game, as there are definitely some redeeming qualities. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was tired of the game after 30 minutes, and struggled to maintain interest through the six hour campaign. Couple this with some frustrating mechanic design in the second half of the game, and I just did not have that much fun with it.

The game starts out with a story only in the most abstract sense. You’re this flying saucer, and you’re on this shadow planet. So it’s your job to go around the shadow planet and do…stuff. That’s about all the setup the game will give you. Now as I’ve said many times on this site, every game doesn’t need a complicated story by any means. However, I felt like the story was so abstract that it didn’t really draw me in to the world. Regardless of the entertainment medium, the first act is where you need to get the audience interested. If the first act is slow, as is the case with Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, it’s hard to overcome that initial impression.

One aspect that the developers do deserve credit for is the variety of the different gizmos you pick up as you progress through the game. There’s a claw you can use to grab stuff, a buzz saw that can break through rocks, and multiple types of offensive weaponry, to name a few. In total, there’s around ten different items you will acquire. One drawback of this many items in such a short game is that some of the gadgets you acquire really only come into play for no more than 10-15 minutes of the game. While yes, the mechanics that drive these gizmos are very unique, I feel that fewer overall mechanics probably would have served the game better.

What the game likes to do is throw puzzles at you where you need to use one of the particular items in your arsenal for a very specific purpose. For example, there is a section where you need to use your claw hand to latch onto parts of the world to avoid a periodic current. This segment is basically the only place in the entire game where you need to use the claw for this purpose. In most cases, to the designer’s credit, which item you need to use for which purpose does become apparent fairly quickly. There was one particular puzzle, however, where I got stuck because I didn’t know I needed to feed a water worm a pellet of food. There was no indicator that I could even feed pellets to water worms; it would have been nice if this had been established by the game.

There were also multiple occasions where I wished the controls were tuned more tightly. For instance, aiming in general can become pretty frustrating. The aiming controls are essentially close to what you’d expect in a “pray-and-spray” 2D game like Geometry Wars. Unfortunately, they took these pray-and-spray mechanics and translated them into a game where in many instances, precise aiming is a requirement. But bar none, the biggest offenders of poorly tuned controls are the missile guidance segments.

In the missile guidance segments, you essentially have a guide a missile through a narrow, winding pathway to some target. Unfortunately, the way you guide the missiles is pretty unintuitive. When I originally encountered a missile guidance section, I first assumed that I needed to use the left analog stick to turn the missile. That’s because when you’re in one of these segments, the camera centers and zooms in on the missile. It turns out that the left analog stick still moves your flying saucer, even though there’s no good reason to move your flying saucer if you’re trying to guide a missile. Once I figured out I needed to use the right analog stick, I first thought that the analog stick simply rotated the missile. So if I hit left on the analog stick, I’d expect the missile to rotate to the left.

It turns out I was wrong. The direction you press the right analog stick corresponds to the direction the missile will go in. So for example, if you press up on the right stick, the missile will go up on the screen. If you press right, the missile will go right. The thing is, the missile doesn’t just pivot; it has a turning radius. So when you need to make a 90 degree turn, it’s not very easy to say the least. After failing a few times, I moved on, hoping that perhaps it wasn’t a required puzzle and was only necessary for 100% completion. Turns out, every single one of the missile guidance segments are required to finish the game. Every single one. Why they focused so much on missile guidance and neglected some of the more interesting mechanics, I’ll never know.

It may sound like I hated the game, but I actually didn’t. I did enjoy the design of some of the areas. For example, I definitely enjoyed the mechanical level where you mess around with rotating gears. But for every area I did enjoy, there was a corresponding area I didn’t. But perhaps the pace of the game just wasn’t for me. Everything seems to just move along slowly, and backtracking can especially lull you to sleep. The other thing is because the game is so short, you don’t really have the satisfaction that you get in a game like Metroid, where you can go back to earlier areas and just destroy everything with your arsenal.

The one area that Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet definitely excels in is its art. There’s some very unique art design through the entire game, and I really like the uses of outline in all of the creatures and areas. Each major area of the game world also has a unique art style; there’s an underwater area and an ice area, and several other in between. Michel Gagné, the creator of ITSP, has quite the animation background with credits on films such as An American Tail and The Iron Giant. You can definitely see his flair at work in this game.

Unfortunately, art design is only one of many disciplines you must excel at to make a good game. While Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet isn’t terrible by any means, it also isn’t great. I’m a bit perplexed by all the positive press surrounding this title, but perhaps there’s just some key aspect of the game I didn’t connect with. From my perspective, if you want a Metroid-style game, there are several better choices out there.

VERDICT: SICK CANARY

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is available now on Xbox Live Arcade. Reviews appear every Friday on Game Canary. The Game Canary review system is detailed here.

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Sick Canaries, Xbox 360

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