inMomentum

It's not every day that we see a game that requires so much spatial awareness as a parkour game blended with first person view. The last time something like that was seen was on Mirror's Edge, and it got mixed reactions for that. So now indie developer Digital Arrow tries to take the challenge for themselves with inMomentum.

The game's controls take some getting used to, and there is definitely a learning curve, but nothing impossible. You move with the WASD keys and look with the mouse. Right click is the "horizontal jump", a hop forward to jump over gaps. Left click is for vertical jumping, which is essentially a wall jump. Left shift slows down time and left alt makes you fall faster. Both of those actions require you to spend energy from the same self-regenerating gauge, so you can't do those forever. Finally, space bar fires an obnoxiously slow-recharge energy projectile to open gates. The momentum from the title comes from the time you spend sprinting on the floor. The more you run without hitting an obstacle, the faster you become.

Now picture yourself running and jumping around THIS.

inMomentum suffers from many things. The first problem lies in the lack of variety. There are a few levels and only two modes. The first mode is Sphere Hunt, where the player must run through the course collecting glowing orbs, and if they miss even one, they can't complete the stage. The lack of polish and presentation shine during sphere hunt, as the player is given no indication of where sphere are other than seeing them with their own eyes. This leads to many frustrating moments when you realize you missed a hidden sphere all the way back at the beginning of the stage. To make matters worse, many spheres are often placed in positions that break the flow, which then breaks momentum, which is vital to break time attack records.

The second mode, Time Attack, is the exact same map, spheres and everything, only this time you're not required to get the spheres. And yet there they stay, a monument of the developers' laziness towards polish. Time Attack is where the game shines: there are multiple approaches and you'll often find yourself replaying the same map over and over, trying to find out a way to be even faster.

Other than the two modes, there are a couple difficulty levels, though the game never bothers explaining to you what the difference is between them. The only thing i know about those difficulty levels is that the last one removes from you the ability to do a midair jump after a walljump. There is also a multiplayer mode, but literally not a single person plays it, so i was unable to try it out.

Don't let the quick frame changes fool you, it looks like more fun than it is.

The laziness towards the spheres and lack of explanation on the difficulty levels are only the beginning of inMomentum's presentation problems. The menus are clunky, lack options and love to forget stuff. Done with that level? Well, you have to go all the way back to the main menu, to then pick single player, a new level (the level selection always starts at the first level), and do make sure that you chose the right game mode and difficulty, for the game always assumes you want to play sphere hunt on casual. That's the kind of thing that sounds harmless until you realize how much time you waste going back and forth doing the same thing a thousand times, each time more frustrating than the last. It's even more annoying when it's something with such a simple solution. That's not even scratching the surface. There are no personal leaderboards and no way to see the global ones (consisted of a top 10 only) without beating the level first. And this is a game based entirely on time attacks.

And then there are the gameplay issues. The level design has many tiny little gaps, and you never know which ones you can just run through and which ones you have to jump over; Sometimes vertical jumps just decide not to work; ramps, instead of working like ramps, require you to do a horizontal jump followed by a vertical jump, or else it might as well be a wall; the lack of spatial awareness keeps you from knowing just how large your character are, and sometimes gaps in walls you thought were passable aren't; sometimes, for no reason at all, the game holds you in midair, not letting you pass through something. You then find out you were stuck because a tiny part of yourself was touching the wall, as if the character was one giant rubber cube the size of the field of view.

If there is a third person mode, the game did an awful job at telling me that

The technical department doesn't do much better either. The graphics are simplistic, but not in a charming way. They just feel bland. There are some textures that end up confusing the player in such a way you're unable to see if you're falling or going up, unless you stop looking at what you're doing and look up/down. Needless to say, that's very unpractical. The soundtrack is composed of a single song, and that's it.

In the end, inMomentum is a game that can prove itself to be fun sometimes, but i just can't recommend it to anyone. You can buy it at your own risk, and you may even enjoy it, because there is fun to be had in this game. It's a shame then, that a game that has potential for so much more is held back by so many things.

Bruno Sampaio, NoobFeed.