Machina Rising

As far as platformers go, they are not usually designed with a rich story in mind, given the fact that their purpose is to challenge players with traps and pesky enemies. However, that is not always the case, because there are quite a few platformers out there that feature great stories. Hence, it’s mostly about how much time and money the developers have at their disposal, or it depends on what type of game they are trying to create.

Machina Rising is a 2D action-platformer sporting fast-paced mechanics and retro graphics, in which your only goal is to collect a handful of objects by exploring different parts of the environment. Since the project was designed for a game jam competition, it is obviously pretty basic in most regards, but it still holds up in the gameplay department, at least f you are not too picky.

To begin with, you play as a character trying to reach three cores required for some important reactors. These cores are hidden around the rather small game world, but they are well-guarded by all sorts of robots and drones that attack on sight. On top of that, every time you pick up one core the enemies get stronger and more annoying, so the difficulty level rises as you make progress, which is a nice touch.

Your character does not have many special abilities, since you can only swing a sword, jump and dash over short distances, but that’s more than enough to overcome most obstacles. However, the wall jump mechanics are a tad unrefined, since it takes a lot of trial and error in order to climb structures. For some reason, the character has to rotate first in order to make the next jump, which is extremely annoying and slow.

As for the graphics, they are kept to a minimum, but that’s to be expected when you consider the short development period. Hence, most of the game world looks more or less the same in terms of the tiles used for the level design, but the mazes differ depending on where you are. The animations are pretty smooth as well, so the overall game doesn’t look cheap or lazy.

Machina Rising is quite clearly more of a prototype than an actual, complete game, but it’s still pretty fun if you can get over some of its annoyances. Thus, if you get the wall jumping right, it shouldn’t take you very long to beat the levels.