Electropy

Simple games with ingenious mechanics have the ability to become a hit overnight, as long as they feature enough interesting gimmicks to make everyone curious. Hence, while titles like Flappy Bird and the like might appear basic and easy to achieve, the implementation of the mechanics is what makes them a hit, because they take advantage of the medium and they are challenging enough to remain interesting for a long time.

Electropy tries something similar, although the concept is very different when you get down to it. In essence, the main idea is to navigate a variety of tricky levels, using nothing but inertia, angular momentum, and a bit of luck. The ship you control has the ability to stick to walls using an electric arc, which in turn allows you to oscillate and gain momentum.

The levels are the real challenge, on the other hand, because they are designed to make your progress as painful and as difficult as possible. Not only do they require impeccable timing and good reflexes, but you also need to watch out for mines and various other traps, which can end your fun in a single shot. Thus, the difficulty level is quite high, although not at all impossible.

To move around, you must use the keyboard alone, which may be a tad inconvenient at first, because you must use the directional keys to rotate the ship. This gets uncomfortable in the beginning, since you have to do many things at once, but once you learn how to manage every function, things get easier. Mouse implementation would have been much more convenient, on the other hand.

As far as the graphics are concerned, they are not exactly bad, but they’re not something you would write home about. The ship and the few special effects that decorate the environments are quite decent, but the actual environments could have used a bit more care. Hence, the texturing is awful and way too repetitive to make the experience memorable in any way.

All things considered, Electropy is a tad too unrefined to be considered a good game, but it is challenging enough to be considered fun. Hence, if you need something interesting to do and you’ve run out of ideas, this can serve the purpose just as well, as long as you do not get your hopes up.