So you've read the preview,
played the demo, looked out of
the window for a bit and
brushed your teeth. Fear not!
For, at last, the game
everyone's calling, um, Tilt is here.
It's a puzzley sort of game very much like the
ancient
Locomotion. Each of the fifty levels is made up
of an incomplete maze, with all the bits you need to
finish it off scattered around the screen. A ball travels
around the maze under its own steam, and you have to
whizz a pink cursor around the place, putting the maze
together so that the ball can escape. Naturally, that
isn't all. Icons abound in the corridors of the maze, and
these do everything from transporting your ball across
the screen to causing a nasty janitor to appear and
steal one of your lives. What a rat, eh?
Mind the gap
Right. Onto the wibbly bits. For a start, the control
method is stunningly weird. You have to get your head
round the fact that your pink cursor is in fact a gap into
which the pieces of maze can move - you know, like
the missing tile in those plastic sliding number games
you used to get in Christmas crackers. This means that
whenever you move the gap, the
adjacent tile moves in the opposite
direction to slide into it. What
this
means is that every joystick move
you make causes the pink blob to
move in the opposite direction. (If
you think it sounds confusing,
you ought to try playing the
game. The best way I found to
cope with it was to hold the
joystick upside-down.) This
kind of game really needs
pinpoint control, and sadly
Tilt
just doesn't provide it.
If by some miracle you manage to, ahem, tune your
vibes to this bonkers control method, a pretty playable
game is revealed. Fifty levels should keep
Loco fans
occupied for ages, and a two-player option and maze
editor have been lobbed in for good measure.
Tilt isn't
a bad game, dearie me no. It's just that the bewildering
controls sabotage the fun factor fatally. Draw your own
conclusions. Okay, I'll draw them for you. If you want a
quiet, relaxing enjoyable puzzler, for heaven's sake
don't get
Tilt.