17 replies to this topic

[Robo_1]

Title: Inversion
Format: PS3/360
Release Date: Feb 07, 2012
Developer: Saber Interavtive
Publisher: Namco
Website: www.inversion.com

The recent trailer released for this has really caught my eye. Developed by Saber Interactive (the same team who developed the more than respectable FPS, Time-Shift), Inversion is a third person shooter, which allows you to manipulate gravity during combat.

Initial impressions seem to paint it as a Gears-alike with gravity effects, that delivers solid combat and great looking set pieces. Whilst that's all fine by me, I'm also hoping that there will be elements to it which are closer to Psi-Ops, where you can use your powers and environment to dispose of enemies.

Media:

E3 Trailer


CGI Movie


Live Action Trailer


Gallery


Press:

Joystiq

Where Inversion does differentiate itself from Gears (aside from the obvious gravity play) is through its destructible environments. Concrete gets chewed up during shootouts and crumbles realistically, especially the concrete cover scattered about the environments. The most impressive example of destruction I caused was in unloading a turret gun on a two-story building, destroying the face of the building, and then its support structures. Eventually, what was left toppled. While an impressive display, it was also scripted, so it's unlikely every building will be as destructible in the game.

Eurogamer

Like you, enemies need to make use of cover to avoid being shot to bits. However, there's nothing to stop you picking up their cover and moving it out of the way - or forming your own cover with your gravity tools. Or you can pick up the enemies themselves, drawing them towards you and firing them out as projectiles.

Gravity has been disturbed throughout the world, and it isn't finished either. When a skyscraper in the distance topples to the ground, creating an enormous dust cloud, it also triggers a shockwave that distorts gravity in your immediate surroundings.

But the effects are localised, so you're fighting enemies who are moving between cover points on a plane of gravity at a right angle to you (right angles seems to be the theme) while from your perspective they're advancing along the wall.

Gamesradar

We're hoping for an adventure similar to Psi-Ops, but so far there's an unmistakable whiff of average-o-blaster, Fracture. Some over-enthusiastic PR talk boasts of "nonstop firefights" (we're hoping it's an exaggeration) and "things most people didn't think possible on the current generation of consoles" (which just gets: ?), suggesting the game needs bigging up because it isn't impressive enough to speak for itself. Like Timeshift, we're sure it'll be a solid title, but Inversion's unlikely to be the revolution it claims.

Reviews:

Metacritic 360: 53
Metacritic PS3: 57

[VN1X]

Wow, obviously PC footage but visuals look solid. The zero-gravity part at 2:11 seems great as well!

I can't say that I'm willing to spend full price on this but definitely looks like one to watch.

[Robo_1]

Wow, obviously PC footage but visuals look solid. The zero-gravity part at 2:11 seems great as well!

I can't say that I'm willing to spend full price on this but definitely looks like one to watch.

Cheers for posting that, it looks fantastic, and remains my most anticipated game of 2012.

As I've said before, it looks as much like the spiritual successor to Psi-Ops as anything else.

[Stanley]

Looks great it's a shame there haven't been more game to make use of physics and gravity. Psi Ops, and to lesser extent Second Sight, were ahead of their time.

[VN1X]

http://www.gametrail...nversion/732238

What the fuck?!

[Spainkiller]

Playing this right now, and boy, is it shit It's like an ultra low budget Gears of War with a gravity gimmick that isn't any fun, mainly because it's superfluous to the shooting and it's horrendous to control.

[Robo_1]

Really sad to hear this has turned out badly. The concept looked great. Ah well, sub £20 pick up it is.

[Harsin]

I've got this on rental at the moment. First impressions weren't good at all, it starts with a turret section - if that wasn't bad enough on its own, the vibration when you fire is set so high that it was constantly making my controller switch off, until I turned the option off in the menu. Then shortly after that I had a hard-lock and I had to reboot the Xbox manually. It also likes to switch to cutscenes so much you'd be forgiven for thinking you were playing a PS1 JRPG at times. It's definitely mediocre, I know it's lazy to call something a Gears of War rip-off, but goddamn if that doesn't fit in this case, the baddies look like Locust who failed the audition and your main gun is a retro-lancer with the serial numbers filed off. But there is some enjoyment to be eked out of it occasionally, the gravity powers on the whole are used pretty lazily and there's pretty much no room for experimentation, but the odd section where you find yourself walking up the side of a skyscraper or along the the ceiling of a building can be fun, Don't touch this with a barge-pole tied to another barge-pole for £40, but if you have a rental package or you see it in a bargain bin for £10 it might be worth a try,

[Lothar Hex]

There's one good thing about this game:

[AndyKurosaki]

Just got this on rental now, not expecting a lot from it as it looked pretty mediocre in the review on PSM3's coverdisc.

[Robo_1]

I noticed this has been released at a budget price, (24.99 from Zavvi) so decided to take a look, and thus far I've been enjoying it. It does take a while to get going, and the incessant way the cut scenes leap into the gameplay every 10 or so minutes seems overkill, given the basic story of alien invasions and lost daughters they've cobbled together, but there's plenty to enjoy here.

Technically it can be a bit of a mixed bag (PS3), on the one hand, they've crafted a nice aesthetic, with plenty of destruction, excellent physics and a very interactive world, yet the frame rate can often be found playing catch up with the action.

The basic duck and shoot gunplay isn't particularly distinctive, and feels fairly flat next to something like Gears or Uncharted, but the gravity switching trick is a great addition, and for the first time in a long time, I actually feel as though I'm playing something I haven't seen a hundred times before. Sure, its a gimmick, and ultimately a gimmick can't carry a game alone, but it does take a dreary cover shooter and kicks it up several notches. The first time gravity shifts and you find yourself falling through the windows of a skyscraper, and continuing the battle vertically was a great moment.

It does start painfully slow though, with a whole prison break section which just treads water until the game starts throwing some gravity shifts at you. I'm hopeful that later on in the game, you'll actually be able to twist the gravity yourself, as at the moment all you can do is create light or heavy gravity zones, to clear debris or disable enemies.

The game seems to be building up nicely though, and the more I'm progressing, the more interesting things they're doing with the whole gravity aspect. Certainly worth a look, and I've no indication that I'm going to regret the 25 notes I dropped on it.

[mr_woo]

This supports coop doesn't it ? Might be at least fun with a friend.

[Robo_1]

Yeah, co-op is supported so that could be fun.

[Harsin]

After saying this was worth a punt on the cheap, I take that back, it turns into utter plop after a certain point. Do you like protracted tedious boss fights? Then this is the game for you! They came up with three boss designs and they were obviously proud of them because they make you fight them again and again and again. It's not even that they're hard, they just go on forever as you plink away at their health and some even have multiple stages (if you die, guess what, you go back to the very first stage of the fight)/.I guess they're trying to encourage you to use your grav powers and chuck stuff at them as that does more damage, but that's such an unwieldy process (first you have to fire your grav power at the object you want, then you have to aim at the object when it's floating in the air and press another button to grab it, then you have to aim and press another button to fire it - all the while this is happening you move ridiculously slowly and can't use cover which isn't exactly ideal when some massive bastard is raining a constant stream of rockets at you). To add insult to industry you have to worry about the health of your braindead A.I. partner who thinks it's great idea to stand out in the open in the middle of WW3, if you don't run over and press X to revive him pretty quickly it's an automatic game over. When you go down it's also an automatic game over as your partner missed the lesson at the academy on reviving someone by patting them on the back. After fighting one boring boss for the fourth (!) time and then after two minutes of gameplay having to fight another reiteration of a boss, I thought life's too short and deleted it.

[AndyKurosaki]

Yeah I've only done two boss fights so far, and they've been in a pain in the arse. Kind of makes me wish I'd stuck it on Easy rather than Normal, as I've died a few times already.

It's not a bad game, but not a great one either. It genuinely is a huge Gears rip off. Gun with blade attachment. Man with missing family, asking if anyone's seen his kid. Bald, Hoffman like Sargent. Enemies emerging from underground.

Some bits are alright, but then you hit a frustrating bit and start thinking "can I be arsed to keep playing?". It's a pain each checkpoint remembers how much ammo you had, one Level started me off with no ammo or grenades as I'd used everything to finish the previous level. So I had to run through a battlefield of generic enemies to even get a gun to fight back with.

[mr_woo]

Finished this today with my coop partner and I must say, we both quite enjoyed it I think it comes down to a few reasons, we stuck it on easy and the fact you're playing with a friend and don't have to play with shittastic AI also really really helps and adds to the fun. I liked the way the game slowly builds up with the powers it gives you and then by the end you're floating in zero g fighting enemies, shifting around different gravity planes, using different powers etc. My favourite thing was making enemies float and then grabbing them and executing them in mid air

As has been said they make you fight the same bosses over and over again but thankfully we didn't have too many problems. Had to retry a few times but that's about it. The story makes no fucking sense whatsoever and they leave so many things unresolved I can't really tell you that much. It's like at the end they just went 'Noooope! lulz' and forgot to give the players any sort of reasons whatsoever.

So yeah, a fun rental or less than £10 purchase I reckon, especially if you have a coop partner to play with. I could see single player being very annoying at times and whilst the game doesn't really scream 'must buy' I can't say there was anything really terrible about it either.

EDIT - Forgot to mention that the 360 version seemed a bit buggy on it as well. At times we had to restart checkpoints so as the next part would activate. Thankfully not too frequent but it did happen on occasion. Another time my coop partner got stuck on some scenery as well.

[kanedaa]

Played this with mr_woo and can pretty much echo his thoughts. Even going through it on easy we were both surprised at how quickly you can die, so when I replayed some checkpoints solo on normal/hard it was no surprise to find the boss fights can be really frustrating, with some really cheap deaths. Motto of the story - play it co-op, stick it on easy, enjoy the silliness and go crazy with the grav powers which are a lot of fun.

Some additional gripes include the sheer number of cutscenes in the first few chapters, where it's literally 'walk ten paces' cutscene 'kill 5 guys' cutscene etc. I also found the controls a little but clunky, particularly later on where you can tell they want you to switch grav modes back and forth in battle, but with how easy you get cut down it just doesn't seem workable. Again, playing in co-op could help here if you're co-ordinated, as one could focus on low grav while the other uses high grav.

[Robo_1]

Just finished it, and I'm sad to say it was all rather disappointing after that first city level. The cool level flipping effect is only fully demonstrated in that initial skyscraper section, and then it's wheeled out to weak effect, once or twice in the later levels.

Some of the zero g parts were great fun, and the gravity gun is used to good effect throughout, but after the initial two hours, it all devolves into a rather joyless boss rush, where you'll face the same pair of bosses (the slave driver and an armored sentry) in life sappingly quick succession.

I saw it through to the end, but there's no question that it fails to deliver on the thrilling trailers. Certainly my biggest disappointment was the sparsity of the gravity switching. They were the highlight moments of the game by a country mile, and for it to be used to it's full effect only once (twice if you're being particularly generous) was a maddening tease for what could have been.

It's certainly not the worst game out there, and I wouldn't argue with a £10 price point, but I'd only play on past the early city levels if your back log consists exclusively of Wii mini game collections.