Game: Twin Sector
Developer: DnS Development
Genre: First Person
Verdict: If you want free running stick with Mirror’s Edge
Pros: There are some interesting ideas.
Cons: Controls too jittery and repetitive scenery.
Acquired: Developer Provided
Fallout 3 has a lot to answer for. Not only did Bethesda nuke Washington DC, but they are also guilty of making the old ‘locked in an air raid shelter for x amount of time’ storyline cool again.
In an interesting twist, developers DnS Development have taken the ‘vault’ idea and merged it with the storyline from Wall-E and the gameplay of both Mirror’s Edge and Portal, in an attempt to create an interesting take on the tried and true FPS. With such lofty influences, DnS has set the bar for the game very high indeed.
The result of this unholy concoction of genres is Twin Sector. You are cast as a champion free-runner/spelunker who is recruited by the military to be cryogenically frozen in a ‘vault’ with hundreds of other talented individuals, in order to save the human race from being wiped out by nuclear war. The introduction also alludes to some acts of heroism on the part of our heroine leading to her being chosen for joining some of the worlds great minds in a large underground freezer.
You are awoken by the computer controlling the ‘vault’ when there is a reactor leak that threatens to wipe out the entire sleeping population with one task in mind: fix the reactor and save humanity. The task falls to you, as you are apparently the only person the computer can defrost without killing.
The only tool that you have at your disposal is a pair of gloves, but not just any gloves though. The gloves perform tasks in a similar way to Half-Life 2’s gravity gun. The left glove acts as a tractor beam drawing smaller items to you and pulling you to walls across chasms too wide to jump. The right glove is a repulsor, allowing you to catapult items in you hands like homemade projectile missiles, jump over high obstacles or cushion yourself from high falls. Every challenge the game throws at you can be conquered by using the gloves and so, becoming adept in the interactions between right hand and left hand is paramount to your experience of Twin Sector.
Fortunately this process is aided by the fact that the control scheme is fairly simple. Standard FPS conventions apply, with the left and right mouse buttons mapped to the corresponding gloves. The same goes for the keyboard with the usual WASD control scheme, having space being mapped to the jump command helps gamers feel instantly at home in DnS’s underground environment.
Here is where things start to go awry. Whilst the controls are as intuitive as the current mouse-keyboard convention can be, the calibration leaves a lot to be desired. There is a minute lag between key-presses and the corresponding action, making timing of complex maneuvers rather delicate. Furthermore, adjusting the mouse sensitivity levels, which is a five setting switch rather than an analogue slider, has no apparent effect on how the mouse responds.
The control issues are compounded by a lack of any sense of solidity in movable objects. Metal crates, for example, whilst exhibiting a meaty metallic clunk when hit, can be kicked around easier than an empty soda can in a school playground. This makes using them for stepping on nigh-on impossible. On one occasion, an attempt to climb out of a deep hole from which I was collecting a fuse for a lift motor by stacking crates, left me spending at least half an hour trying to arrange crates in a pile from which to jump up onto the next ledge from. I would place a crate on top of another one, go to collect the next one and turn back around to watch the one I’m carrying nudge the top crate ever-so-slightly and knock it flying.
For a game whose main play mechanic relies on physics, to have such discrepancies in the realism, is something that is almost inexcusable.
At the same time as large metal crates fly around like polystyrene, the main character’s body would seem to have the solidity and frailty that you would expect of a human body. I begin to wonder how they can model the physics of a human body accurately but then fail on something as simple as a metal crate.
Another unfortunate side-effect of the lag is compounded by the need to charge each glove to get the full effect. Firing off the right glove can counteract long falls, but even the tiniest mistiming can leave you seeing the red mist of death. Thankfully, the autosave checkpoints are forgivingly frequent. The latency in the mouse controls, however, nullify any effect the regular checkpoints have meaning. The sight of the loading screen all too quickly becomes a frustration rather than a relief.
The game initially looks good even on an elderly DirectX 9 machine, but the decorative motif of sprayed concrete and structural steel varies only slightly throughout the game’s many frustrating levels. Twin Sector is not all doom and gloom though, despite the repetitive décor. The themes behind the game and the interesting use of physics provide a welcome change from the slue of run-and-gun FPS and colourful RTS titles that now saturate the PC games market.
Sadly, lofty themes and the imaginative use of physics do not make up for the irritatingly jittery mouse and keyboard controls and the dull repetition of the environment. For a game whose main play mechanic relies on physics, having such discrepancies in the realism is something that is almost inexcusable. This coupled with the drab environments inhibit Twin Sector from realizing the potential of the game’s underlying concepts.
DnS Development have to be applauded in their attempt to provide an innovative physics-based spin of the first person genre, but the game frustrates too much for it to be more than a passing distraction.
Popularity: unranked [?]
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