Headlander review: Metroid meets 1970s retrofuturism meets disembodied heads - barrettwhiseldiver

At a Carom

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Brilliant ex post facto-futurist aesthetic
• Clever reimagining of Chess as a 2D shooter

Cons

• Story feels like it's nonexistent its final enactment
• Simple and, at times, repetitive

Our Finding of fact

Headlander's retrofuturist aesthetic is creative enough to make up for the fact its underlying mechanism are anything simply.

You awake to find you're just a head. That's it. You've got hair, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, maybe steady a mustache—if you play your cards flop—but down at the bottom of the inning where there should be a neck there's…well, nothing in the least. Air.

Or, really, there's a rocket thruster. Through whatever miracle of science, your disembodied head is controlled inside a spacesuit helmet with the aforementioned thruster retrofitted to your neck-hole.

A gentleman's gentleman onymous Earl gets on the intercom and tells you not to panic—and not to bother shriek, since you don't have any lungs. The title of this game says IT all: Headlander.

Mind over thing

Headlander ($20 on Steam) is the latest from Double Fine, the studio of Psychonauts and Cruel Legend fame. I'd squall Headlander a 2D Metroidvania—our bit of the summer—simply if so information technology's a lightweight one.

Your last goal is to overthrow a rogue AI, Old man, but doing thusly entails about five or six hours of exploring a space post beforehand. Sometimes you fly around, a disembodied head careening through and through hallways. Most of the time you seize other bodies though—accomplished by vacuuming the heads off other robots and then fastening yourself in wish some high-tech puppet.

Robots descend in a variety of colors, and this is Headlander's main means of gating your progress. White robots (citizens) have the fewest privileges, red have slightly more, orange more that, and the spectrum continues rising until violet—the robots with the to the highest degree approach. Untold of Headlander entails finding a body with sufficient door privileges to enter the next area.

It's not very difficult, nor is thither genuinely any captivate. The game's five or so independent areas are all largely self-contained. Connected, sure, but you won't (for instance) find a violet door in the opening surface area that forces you to return later. Thus wherefore I say it's a jolly jackanapes Metroidvania—Headlander mostly follows a linear progress, with the option to return to earlier areas if you missed something.

You preceptor't have to, though. If you want, Headlander is a direct shot, bug out to finish. And I signify that literally, as much of Headlander's length is padded by combat. You either nail foe robots until they blow up or shoot their heads off, which is a lot easier with a mouse. Or just suck their heads off with your hoover-neck. Next room, do the same—so on consume the line until the end.

Later in the game you start to encounter simplistic fritter-all-the-targets-at-formerly puzzles which break improving the repeating, but these feel almost like an afterthought apt their delayed appearance.

Oh, and in that location's a pair of horrendous boss battles. They're not particularly arduous. Simply dreary, as you chip away at their health 1 tiny fragment at once and wonder wherefore games even bother with boss battles in 2016 considering almost of them are terrible.

In the year 2000…

Phew, that's a lot of negativity. And for good reason: Headlander is just a holmium-hum game.

But Large Fine's greatest natural endowment is pick fantastic source material to emulate. Cost it Brutal Legend's classical tilt-elysian hellscape or Broken Age's Hasbro spaceship, the studio has a knack for drawing happening esthetics other developers have ignored. And it's a talent that's served them fountainhead, often fashioning Double Powdery's titles deserving seeing even if the crippled itself is nothing special.

Such is the case with Headlander.

Here, Double Floury has tapped the retrofuturist aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s. This spans books (the covers of Asimov or Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke novels) and film (2001: A Distance Odyssey, Solaris, Logan's Run) and even industrial design (lava lamps). See if you can spot that high one in the background, hither:

Headlander is each browns and oranges and purples, shag carpet and disco music floors and people talking about transcendentalism, balloon lettering and VHS scan lines, pastel-umbrageous spaceships and stumpy mainframe computers and slim androids. There's even a little of euphony that soundssuspiciously alike "Infinite Oddity." It's a pastiche of the 1970s with 1970s fiction, the realities of the day mashed up with their dreams of the future. And IT's enchanting.

Virtually brilliant of all is a level organized around an out-of-control Bromus secalinus Bradypus tridactylus. Here, in an reverberation of Tron, you're forced to participate in a game that she calls "The future of Cheat." Robots in this area for each one take cues from Bromus secalinus, and so the Bishop can lone shoot lasers on a bias while the Knight's laser fires in an "L" shape.

Shoved into the midst of Headlander? It's a trifle of an odd tan, a wholly-unique moment that doesn't really match the rest of the game. But I'd be loathe to turn a loss IT, because it's and then damn creative.

Bottom rail line

That's an apropos summary of Headlander as a whole. It's a tur tedious at times, some combat and puzzle-solving. None of it makes more sense—the story is vaporous, and the entire denouement seems to be missing, with the story just cutting bump off after the final boss fight. It's not by a blame sigh an incredible game.

But it's so damned ingenious I found myself drawn to IT in spite of myself. I desired to see what came next, what Weird aspect of retrofuturism would represent crop up in the background. Headlander is proof—arsenic if we needed information technology, at this power point—that a creative concept and aesthetic tooshie get you quite an ways, provided they're slapped over the clappers of serviceable-if-uninspired mechanics. And at five or vi hours, Headlander gets in and out quickly enough IT doesn't really overstay its wanted. It's perfect for an afternoon or two of light entertainment.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/415820/headlander-review-metroid-meets-1970s-retrofuturism-meets-disembodied-heads.html

Posted by: barrettwhiseldiver.blogspot.com

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