Forma.8

Genre: Metroidvania

Players: 1

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Review:

Forma.8 is a Metroidvania released on multiple platforms including the Nintendo Switch in 2017, although unlike most Metroidvanias, this game is not a Platformer, but a game that has you floating freely through the game’s environments.

The presentation here is very good, with a mix of 2D and flat-shaded 3D visuals that make for a nice, stylized look that makes the world more interesting to explore, and with an atmospheric soundtrack and minimalist sounds that make this game an audiovisual experience even though it’s not doing anything impressive on a technical level.

I will at least credit the gameplay for having some unique elements to it, such as how players must take into consideration the physics of the world to solve some of its puzzles. However, I ultimately found myself frustrated with this game more often than I was delighted with it. Your character (an orb with eyes that seems to be an anthropomorphic drone… I guess?) not only moves slowly through the game’s environments, but its momentum makes it a pain to steer around, as it takes forever to turn. This sometimes made seemingly simple tasks far more difficult to accomplish than they should have been, and made it that much harder to appreciate the game’s moments of brilliance when so much of it felt like a slog to me.

In the end, Forma.8 may still be of interest to Metroidvania fans for its fairly unique Platformer-less free-floating nature, but for most this game is likely to be far more frustrating than it should be due to its sluggish controls and slow pace.

tl;dr – Forma.8 is a Metroidvania that has players directing a floating drone through a stylized otherworldly environment. The presentation here is very good, but the sluggish gameplay and unresponsive controls make this game far too frustrating to play.

Grade: C+

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