Gadgetory

hey everybody this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and this Saturday heat signature episode 7 where we are going to talk about the indie action title waveform is actually a very cool title they label it as casual as well but it is a pretty challenging game so I don't know that most casual players would like it but if you are a completionist if you love challenge games and if you love games like platformers they then you would probably really like waveform so let's talk a little bit about what it is but we see right now we are flying through the solar system in space obviously and the game is your plan as a particle of light essentially and your goal is to navigate your beam of light through space and collect different orbs that are scattered throughout the area and you can use all kinds of objects out in space to your advantage like mirrors and and you have to avoid things like dark matter which will of course affect your light negatively so it is a space game you do go through the solar system your objective is to bring your light to the Sun our Sun of course and you are also discovering the mysteries that are causing different troubles in the solar system like distortion of one of plutos moons or stuff like that it is again very challenging puzzle sort of action element game so your light particle you need to adjust your trajectory using the mouse you drag it left and right to increase the wavelength drag it up and down to increase or decrease the amplitude and your goal is to just adjust this trajectory adjust your wave so that it will line up with all the orbs scattered through space and you pick them up and it's actually a lot harder than that though it sounds pretty easy and it looks pretty easy on the screen but the way the orbs are scattered is actually very well done by the game designer or the level designer or whomever works on those maps because it's not perfectly lined up so you might line up your path perfectly you couldn't do it any better for a huge cluster of orbs and then the next one is just slightly off and so you have to panic and readjust your path and try and intercept those as well and if you screw up your path then there's very little chance you'll recover it so you have to make the split-second decision I abandoned this cluster of orbs and try to regroup on the next one or do I try to salvage these orbs and then still try to get the next one's very tough decision and that's what makes the game so hard it does take some quick thinking even though it starts off a little slow but on that note I would like to add that there is no tutorial really for this game other than a couple of screens with text it drops you straight into the action which personally I love I feel like I feel like tutorials can be insulting sometimes in games where you really just want to get the plane right away you don't need a whole bunch of hand-holding but this game definitely drops you in and it does a very good job of it too and it does a great job of ramping you up throughout the game throughout each level there are many objectives of course the primary objective is to get to the end of the level and get out through the through the wormhole i suppose i'm not sure what the proper name is but there is a will call it a wormhole at the end of the level you get out through it and throughout the level there are many objectives like collecting rings that are scattered throughout there and they will give you multipliers for when you're picking up different colored orbs of course your overall goal is to just get the most points and to accumulate points and you can either sort of play against yourself against your own records or you can get on the world leader boards and that's really fun with these types of games because it gives you something to really work at and you can play it sort of against your friends and compare scores and stuff like that you know these types of games pretty well just as all of us do so there are some bonus levels other than the ones I'll show some right now actually there is a distortion effect level which is on one of the moons and that distortion just completely messes up how easy or how hard it is to see the orbs because it sort of makes it actually reminds me a lot of yoshi story where yo she eats or yoshi's island maybe Rio she eats one of the pink floating flowers and he gets all drugs that is exactly what this looks like to me I don't know if anyone else has seen that but it is a pretty cool level and it does mix things up we also have another distortion type level where there's a pulsing light visibility so the light is visible you can see all of the orbs for just a few seconds you gotta line up your path perfectly and then the screen goes black and it comes back and you have a second to see what did I get do I need to adjust my path very challenging level so again if you like challenging games this is your thing to play and it's only a couple bucks let me check it's actually six dollars on Steam right now so an easy pick up really though the beauty of the game is in its gameplay mechanics and the way you use the mouse to adjust wavelength and amplitude so you can achieve those objectives you get all those orbs is pretty hard actually but it is a great game I have trouble relating the gameplay to any other game out there which is good because that means it is unique I think the closest I can do is say it's some kind of weird mix between audiosurf and guitar hero and and platformers something like that if that makes any sense to you but again getting back to mechanics there are all kinds of different elements to interact with in the levels it does a as I said before a very good job at dropping you and slowly and really ramping you up ramping up the difficulty over time and eventually working you out to be a very good player but it does take some time to get to that point so some of the stuff you might interact with you can use mirrors to bounce off of that you break the mirror and it'll bounce you and give you kind of my second kind of like a double jump in your arc there are also clouds that refract there's dark matter that when you collide with dark matter it will destroy all the orbs around you and sort of invalidate that path you are on so very tough to work in between dark matter spots and the actual hordes that is just one of the many obstacles in the game aside from space mines dry another huge annoyance but at the end of every level or at the end of every planet i should say each planet in our solar system is broken up into several levels where you have to sort of work your way through the orbit i'm going to call it of the planet and eventually you hit some of the moons and stuff like that and each moon of course is a bonus level as i said earlier and each planet has at the very end level and event horizon that chases you which makes it much harder to complete or much harder to win and really makes it that much more pressure to get all the worms and get out of that level as soon as possible so again there is not a whole lot more to say it is a very challenging game but that's really the point of it is to be challenging to really push you as a player can become that at this game there isn't a huge story there's a little bit but that's not the reason you play a game like this so again let's recap here if you like platformers if you like games that require a little bit of thinking but aren't quite a puzzle game and if you like action games that can be very fast and challenging and you don't get super frustrated and throw your keyboard easily then I would say this is your kind of game it's only a couple bucks and it is a space themed game so that's another bonus for those of us that like space themed games which is really what pulled me on in the first place it all comes down to just moving your mouse to set up those perfect paths so I guess actually you could say that it's sort of related to Tetris in that way where you're just trying to fit things in but not so much anyway I think that's all for now everyone so catch us next time and please subscribe if you like this video like it if you like this video and of course leave comments if you have any questions at all about the game I will get back to you and let you know whatever you want to know so catch us next time i'll have saturday heat signature episode 8 next week and then we have packs coming up i believe in two weeks now so we will be at PAX East with several people which means I might not get a heat signature up on that saturday but i will try a nun the less so i will catch you guys next time peace