Tweet
The best way to encounter the original Velocity was to have it warp in from nowhere. It was a PlayStation Mini, coming from a relatively unknown studio, with little but a quietly stylish art style to mark it out. You might load it up expecting a competent retro-tinged space shooter in the style of Xenon. And, for a few obliging minutes, that's exactly what you'd get.But then Velocity would start to pull weird tricks, allowing your spaceship to teleport through otherwise impassable barriers, and letting you squeeze a trigger to goose the throttle on the auto-scrolling screen. Soon you were dancing rings around your enemies as often as you were blasting at them and showboating your way across devious top-down mazes where every dead end was actually an invitation to zip past a wall and on to the next hurdle. Xenon was still in there, but it had been recalibrated as a kind of transdimensional game of hopscotch. Velocity was a treat.
And so, for a battle-hardened group of fans, Velocity 2X can't warp in from nowhere in quite the same way. FuturLab's sequel has expectations attached, along with a bigger budget and a larger team behind it. Hey, it's even had a bizarre brush with controversy, after a YouTube commenter objected to the fact that it has a female lead - and branded the lack of an option to play as a male protagonist "bad design".
Read more…
More...