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Kinetic Edge is a new puzzle/obstacle course game which looks and sounds great, and for the most part, is surprisingly intuitive for a game which doesn’t indicate which way you’re meant to be going.
Very colourful and reminding me of the ’80s movie TRON, and TV series Automan (for anyone who remembers that one-off series), there’s a tutorial and three worlds to go through, each with two or three levels to be played. Then comes a final Gauntlet level, which has also has a ‘training’ option.
For the worlds, the Race levels are what I mostly expected with this in terms of making your way through an obstacle course, along the checkpoints and to avoid falling off into the abyss while your ball changes into other objects, just to add slightly to the challenge. Then comes the Golf levels, which is playing the same way but through a mini golf-style course… well, 30 courses of varying difficulty. The final world is the Maze levels, which sees you simply rolling a ball through a maze, the last one being the only real challenge because of the size.
When it comes to the Gauntlet, you get seven minutes to complete a rather tough course, but WITHOUT any checkpoints, so it must be done in one go. Needless to say, I went for the ‘training’ option, where you have checkpoints and ten minutes, instead. I could manage that. No way would I get through it all in one go because there’s too many chances to die.
A couple of oddities: Kinetic Edge game doesn’t register my scores for the last challenge in each section. For example, I completed the 50×50 maze (the largest one) in 7:35, but it still shows as blank, and didn’t update, even when going out of the game and restarting it. Plus, after you finish each level within a world, set, you can’t just click to go onto the next one – you have to go back to the main menu, which is a bit of a kludge. This would be an easy fix to sort out.
I also did try the multiplayer once, and briefly, but no-one else joined.
Still, even without that, the game costs £10, but with 25% off until February 12th, taking it down to £7.49, and I’ve spent around three hours playing it… Okay, so Steam says I’ve been playing it for 3.5hrs, but I went completely down the wrong path in the final round, The Gauntlet, before realising where I should be going. D’oh!
Another odd thing is that there’s an additional three levels under the ‘Arena’ name, which come under multiplayer but not single-player. Since all the others are in the single-player mode, why aren’t the Arena ones? I feel like I’m missing out on content to which I should have access.
Overall, Kinetic Edge is fun, but something to play through once and that’s enough for me.
Kinetic Edge is out now on PC/Steam.
Overall: 6/10
Important info:
- Developer: Seacorp Technologies (SCT)
- Publisher: Seacorp Technologies (SCT)
- Players: Single player campaign, multiplayer
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.