…Flipside of the divine, that is. Our next game comes from Erik Svedäng and his team including Daniel Kaplan, Pernilla Akterhall, Björn Öjlert, Markus Nurmimäki, Stefan Hurtig, Johan Gren, Daniel Rydin, Johan Åberg, Petter Mabäcker, and Andreas Sundin of the University of Skövde in Sweden (I’m assuming Sweden because on his personal about page, it says he was born there) for a 10 week course in 2007.
Flipside of the Divine is really a unique game, and yet it is also familiar. You play the role of an eagle warrior navigating your way through the world of the gods in Aztec mythology. It’s presented in the third person in 3D. Gameplay is really really simple (again, we love simple). You use first person shooter controls. That is, W,A,S,D to move, and your mouse to rotate (or turn). You also have a “flipbird” you use to flip over tiles. See, some of the tiles are open, which means you can fall off. But you can flip up to 5 tiles with the bird. Your objective is to basically just get to the end of the level.
It seems you have unlimited lives, a number of flipbirds and a timer. There are save points marked by a glowing ring on some of the tiles so you can save your progress. I only got through a few levels, but they were pretty interesting. The level design seems pretty solid, as I wanted to keep playing even though I kept dying. That’s usually a good thing when it doesn’t frustrate you. There’s a level in it where these sort of living Aztec glyphs like monsters or something (I couldn’t tell you what they were though because I don’t know much about Aztec mythology), that kept flipping over tiles, and this whole level was like that. You didn’t have any birds, so you basically needed to make sure you didn’t get flipped before getting to the end.
Graphics were adequate, not spectacular, not terrible. There are some neat particle effects, and the menus are themed appropriately. The sounds were also decent but had a tendency to cut out every so-often. There is only “music” in the menus, and even that is sort of an ambient choir sound. Presentation of the game is ok, again not spectacular, not terrible. I think, though, that the focus really is the gameplay. They could have removed any theming and the game would still be good.
The game is both thinking and action. At times you’re running for your life, it seems, and others you can kind of move at your own pace. While earlier I mentioned that the game is simple, it is, but you still get caught when trying to jump with your thumb while moving with wasd, sometimes you want to jump with the mouse, and sometimes you just (or at least I couldn’t) coordinate that I wanted to jump with the space bar. So it’s kind of tricky in the “action” parts. This would be the only flaw though, well that could be corrected if you could change your controls, but unfortunately you can’t.
To make up for the lack of configurable controls, they do have a level editor, and there are several user made levels. This game is completely free, but is for Windows only.
Here’s the trailer:
Name: Flipside of the Divine
Developer: Erik Svedäng (His team can be found on the Flipside homepage and their names are listed at the beginning of this review).
Price: Free
Final analsys: A unique 3D action-platformer.
Where you can get it: The Flipside of the Divine page.
Tags: 3D, action, Aztec, Freeware, fun, game, games, independent, Indie, jump'n'run, mythology, Platformer, Third Person, windows
Watching the trailer, it reminds me of some parts of God of War. I love the ‘seat of the pants’ feeling in games like this where stuff falls apart all around you as you dash forward. It’s one of the few gaming experiences that actually gets my heart rate up; I should make time to check it out. Shame about the controls being hard-coded … even a simple text file where you can tweak them (ala Quake & friends) would be enough for me.
Yeah. Well parts of the game are frenetic like that, and other parts are like puzzle games, where you have to watch out what you “flip over” or destroy with the flip bird. Makes this game fairly unique in it’s own right. As far as the control scheme, I think they thought they didn’t have to provide any extras like editable controls seeing as it was a school project.