Monday Games: A Winter Wonderverse
Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.
Odd timing finding this one, seeing as it won YoYo Games’ Winter Competition and Spring is slowly creeping into the city, but luckily, Frozzd is the sort of thing you can enjoy no matter what the weather outside is like (last Xmas song reference, promise). Similar to the previously discussed here Flash game Space Hopper and Super Mario Galaxy, Frozzd sees moving through stages by leaping between planetoids and letting their gravity take hold as you try to collect enough of whatever it is you’ve been tasked with collecting. It’s a little different here, though, as the things you collect can fight for you.
It’s winter throughout the universe, see, and only you, a scar-wearing astronaut, can save the little guys scattered around each level from the evil ice creatures that have frozen them. You start each level with one unit, using the space bar to switch between his two states: unfreeze and attack. Unfreeze rescues more of his friends when you find them and recovers any of your units that have been frozen, while attack blasts the ice creatures into smaller bits. When all your guys get frozen (or if your suit temperature bottoms out), you have to start the level over again. Simple, right?
Simple, and yet all the little elements at work here - your units, enemy behavior, the planetoids’ gravity - come together to create an experience unique enough that, by the time I was thinking about putting it down to write this, I’d nearly beaten the game. Attacking a group of enemies takes on a surprising tactical twist, as a single blast from them is enough to refreeze one of your guys, allowing them to cut your force to ribbons. In later levels, this means that sometimes the best way to approach them is by leaping to the edge of gravity’s pull, causing it to swing you at a dangerously fast orbit through the middle of them. It can get pretty tense, with an attack quickly turning into a retreat and then a rescue mission as you tip-toe back into their firing range to rescue downed units.
Frozzd is a fun little thing,a brief glimpse at a unique mash up of platforming and tactics play that I’d love to see explored further. You can download the game for free or play it in a browser window if you’re running Windows, and a Mac version is supposed to be in the works.