Gravitron 2

Posted by oddbob on August 31, 2008 · Lovingly Filed Under Featured, Reviews 
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Alright, alright, I confess that I’m an absolute sucker for gorgeous vector style graphics. It’s likely that any regular readers of this little hovel are already fully aware of this quirk though. What I’ve never been the greatest fan of is Thrust-a-like games. It’s not that I find them bad games, it’s just that my rotating and flying skills are more akin to doing in game Challenger impressions than anything especially useful.

Over the past couple of years though, I’ve been forced to reassess my opinions on a couple of occasions. Weibo turned in the rather superb Thrust Extreme, which blew just about everything out of the water by a country mile, then to top it off along came X-Out with Gravitron and well, it managed to fuckmeld bits of Oids and Thrust together in a gorgeous glowy dreamorama. Very nice it was too and received some well deserved critical praise.

So, here I am today then, sitting with a copy of Gravitron 2 in front of me and not a lot of time to play due to having to work my knuckles raw to ensure the competition launch goes smoothly. Or at least, the latter part was the plan until I started playing.

As usual, my first few moments in the game were spent crashing into anything and everything like a complete tool. You’re probably thinking that there’s a lot to crash into on the first level and you can take my word for it that no, there isn’t. I really am that spack handed with this type of game. Rather than throw my hands in the air and walk away, things started getting better rapidly for me. Soon I was doing rather nifty spins around the level, landing perfectly to collect the scientists and taking out the gun turret with ease. Aha! Fantastic. There’s hope for me yet. And then I destroyed the reactor.

I’ve had “oh fucking shit” moments in games before, but there’s not many that instil such a sense of absolute urgency into the player as when the music ratchets up a notch and that countdown appears on screen. It’s a total “get the fuck out of here, fast” moment.

And that’s just the very easy first level. Half an hour later, despite having many other things I should be doing I was still sitting there playing through Gravitron 2. And I swore. Really loudly. There’s not many games I play that manage to put me quite on edge so well. I think it was around level 4 or 5 with a large rotating rock, filled with turrets, a reactor and a laser flitting on and off where attempting to navigate the level left me twitchy as fuck afterwards. If I weren’t already sitting down, I’d have had to go for one quick. Luckily, I had a lovely pair of warm cups of tea on hand to help soothe my nerves.

I can safely say that Gravitron 2 is a fucking lovely game and at under a fiver, it’d be crazy not to take a punt on it. If you’re unsure, check out the original first (as there’s currently no demo for the game at the time of writing) and imagine the game looking even nicer than that and with some fantastic level design to boot. There’s bits of Oids, bits of Defender and obviously bits of Thrust tucked away in it’s glowing package and I’d be hard pushed to recommend it more.

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7 Responses to “Gravitron 2”

  1. the2bears on September 1st, 2008 2:17 am

    Sold! Didn’t know this one was in the works :)

    Bill

  2. Oddbob on September 1st, 2008 2:52 am

    Neither did I until earlier in the week.

    I’m having ace fun with it so far.

  3. Richard Phipps on September 1st, 2008 10:33 pm

    It sure looks nice!!

  4. Oddbob on September 1st, 2008 10:50 pm

    Looks better in motion banged up to widescreen hi-res.

    I was on it till 3am yesterday morning. Still only about 10 levels in (and 3rd on the scoreboard last I checked ;)) and it just gets better as you go on.

  5. X-0ut on September 11th, 2008 3:48 pm

    I’ve just released a patch that solves some of the problems.
    It can be picked up on the G2 page here:
    http://xout.blackened-interactive.com/Gravitron2.html

  6. Shadowcat on September 30th, 2008 12:39 pm

    There’s a version 1.7 out now, which improves lots of things. The game is just awesome!

  7. Oddbob on October 1st, 2008 1:39 am

    Now on Steam, people!

    $4.99

    FUCKING BARGAIN.

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