*****
Umbra: Shadow of Death
Briefly: Umbra is a rough gem, a physics puzzle platformer with a creepy setting. Visual style similarity borrowed from Limbo works splendidly and the game has still a nice amount of its own surprises to show.
Reading some other reviews out here, I admit Umbra does strike some similarities to Limbo especially in the first couple of levels and in the visual style. The similarities end there, as Umbra does its own thing while keeping being a physics puzzle platformer.
Story is pretty simple. Sisters get abducted by aliens. Fortunately for you, the big sis, the robot who took you breaks down and you escape to save your little sister.
Borrow a little something
 |
| That guy looks familiar. |
Umbra also has many mean surprise traps. In fact, you are likely to die to 95% of the traps when encountering them for the first time. Especially first and second levels are basically tributes to Limbo in this sense.
After that the differences grow larger. For one, big sister can swim and dive, permitting a couple interesting but oh, so slow-paced water puzzles. The character is slow at swimming and water takes aeons to drain or refill. Later on one gets to drive a truck through a couple of puzzle and death-filled levels and finally even carry and shoot a frickin' plasma LMG.
Puzzles are not as awesomely well made as in Limbo (duh) but they get the job done. In-game hint system keeps you from being stuck while actually being a hint instead of just telling the answer. Granted, most puzzles in Umbra aren't that difficult to require more than a simple pointing finger as a hint.
Danger and death everywhere
Unfortunately while cool, the truck levels were also the most frustrating in the game. This is because that later the game gets stingy with check points. There's a couple of 5-10 minute sequences where one can screw up in the end and have to restart in the beginning.
Deaths are not only due to traps. Fall damage is everywhere, as the protagonist can take only a couple of meters fall before dying or hitting her head. A little miss step and you're dead. There's even a sneaky surprise trap that uses this and consequently makes you drop carefully down every edge afterwards.
I also died many times because of faulty, buggy physics: by falling into the small crack in-between two crates and somehow being crushed; by impaling into the spikes that were on the underside of the moving platform I just climbed on; by peculiarly not grabbing the ledge I thought I landed on and instead falling to my death. Only after the first playthrough did I learn to avoid these fallouts.
How do you even drive this thing?
I played Umbra with Xbox 360 controller although keyboard would likely have been just as well. All keys and buttons can be remapped.
Controls are pretty good and smooth as long as you stay on foot. The big sister runs, jumps, hangs, swings and climbs like a pro. There's a bug (or a feature?) on jumps that whenever one jumps straight up, the character faces right even if you started facing left. It can be annoying if you really want to grab that ledge left, directly over you.
Swimming is slow as heck, realistic though it is. Big sis can even dive and hold her breath for half a minute. On the edge of water it's a weird as the game differentiates between diving and swimming. I once randomly encountered a bug where I was diving in the air but couldn't move or drown either.
 |
| Levels can be quite big. |
Later levels stage the truck. Since the controls are entirely on or off, you can only full throttle or not at all. This is unfortunate, as you need to drive slowly to avoid crashing the car, so you have to smash the drive key to reach a reasonable speed but not over-do it. Weirdly, if you drive backwards, you can't brake or speed up forward meaning it's impossible to stop on a lean platform. You guessed it: this leads to certain death.
Finally, as this is not a twin-stick shooter, the gun is rather clumsy to aim, controlling the slope with right stick while shooting with the action key. When you get a gun, obviously you will be shot back. It's cumbersome to dodge the flashy blaster shots, as while carrying the gun you have to be stationary to crouch.
Also, there's no key to drop the gun that I could find, instead the gun just falls if you manage a slightly higher fall than a simple jump.
Technical side and style
If you read the above section, you can already tell that there are quite a many bugs and issues. I can only hope they will get fixed or alleviated somehow. That said, I really enjoyed my time with Umbra. Perhaps surprisingly I encountered no game-breaking bugs, and if one gets stuck (which unfortunately happened a dozen times) one could always restart from the previous respawn point.
Visually the graphical style fits Umbra marvellously. It's a bit more colourful than Limbo with some roughly but nicely coloured backgrounds every now and then, with red-yellow fire and the usual blue electricity.
 |
| Hanging around. |
Even the Limbo guy makes an appearance as a rather obvious easter egg: there are side quest prisoners to save that strike a not-so subtle resemblance. No one explains how they got there though. Did the aliens get them too?
By the way, I enjoyed the soundtrack. It keeps the tone mysterious and dark but in an delightful way.
Conclusions
My very first playthrough was over 5 hours long, and then I did two playthroughs of about 2 hours to finish the rest of the achievements. There seems to be only one ending - I was hoping for a different one if I did a near-perfect run.
Umbra is after all a good game. It is rough around the edges and needs patience to finish. Plethora of bugs and lack of checkpoints in a few frustrating puzzles keeps it from being a great game. However, for a project done by a single person I can cut some slack. All in all I think it was well worth the price of 4 euros.
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti