WARP – review

You’re an alien. A cute, cuddly, adorable alien who has been captured and taken off to an undersea lab to be experimented on. Most uncool right? Well, that’s where we start off playing WARP, the most challenging fun and bloody puzzle game I have played in a long time. Yes, I said bloody.

In WARP, you have to escape this research facility that is holding you, using various powers you gain as you advance through the game. You start with no powers and have to run through some tests, which are designed to get you used to the controls, after which you get to play a brief game of Simon says, and then it’s off to the races with your first ability. The ability to – yes, you guessed it- warp. A short range teleportation skill that forms the foundation of your skillset, if you’re not warping, you’re doing it very very very very wrong.

So, what mischief can an adorable little alien with the ability to warp get up to? Well, here we have two choices. We can be the very passive, ninja-like guy, where we avoid conflict and killing everyone as much as is possible, or there is the route I took, warping into –EVERYONE- you come across and “fragging” them, which is to say, blow them apart from the inside. Suprisingly, this game has an age verification before you can purchase it =P

As you progress through the game, things get trickier, there are walls too thick for you to warp through – it’s fairly short range – or sealed off doors, also too thick. There are walls of lasers, and walls of this power draining water. There are even large bodies of water which are instant death if you go into. Hey there are even armed soldiers with shields of that draining water, and turrets that will basically shoot you the second you cross their laser sight, as opposed to the slight delay of human guards.

So what we’ve established here, is that just about everything wants to kill you, and that underwater experimental laboratories are not your friend. Enter, the strategist. If you can’t warp through a guards water shield covering his front, what can you do? Distract him and turn him around to warp at his back? Make a fellow guard shoot him in the face? Or maybe you do just want to hide and sneak your way past him – I suppose you could do the last thing, but you miss out on some gnarly blood splattering =D – there are myriad ways of solving your way through this game, and deaths are very likely, but thankfully there are a lot of checkpoints that will automatically save your progress and respawn you there if you should happen to make a fatal mistake… or ten.

The graphics on this game are very Team Fortress 2-ey. Which is to say more of the fun cartoonish animation style, rather than attempting pure realism, which I suppose is a good thing when dealing with a little alien. The gameplay is simple in that it’s easy for anyone to pick up the game and play without having to learn a ton of obscure keybinds, and most of the main story should be navigable by even the most basic player after a few tries, but the game also features challenge rooms with a Bronze/Silver/Gold ranking system for using specific abilities properly, and let me tell you, they are rather challenging especially if you’re trying for gold on your first try. All in all I rate this game rather highly, and hope there is more to come from Indie developer Trapdoor Inc. The only downside I found about the game even through purchasing it on steam, is that you have to have an Origin account with EA to get into it.

Still, for $10, WARP is a very good buy, and I suggest you all get into it. Happy gaming =D