You are the Shiner.
The Shiner is an impressive guardian with a single objective: to obliterate the darkness that has recently begun encroaching upon the galaxy. Armed with magical light so that you can push away foul mist and nasty creatures, you advance through a sequence of treacherous environments set on mostly barren planets, banishing all it is murky.
Glare is in lots of respects a standard 2D platformer, meaning that you are called upon to accomplish many precise jumps. The original hook thus is your ability to cast a bright beam on enemies and the sector around them, often while airborne. It is advisable master that skill to thrive. At the start, you employ the dazzling beam to repel projectiles and push away the floating purple aliens and skittering nasties that crowd your space, however the beam’s use soon grows beyond such basic utility. Shadowy plants inside the background is delivered to the foreground if you shine light within the right spot, allowing the vegetation to propel you toward higher ground. Switches is also activated, producing zip lines and other helpful technique of navigation. Early on, you gain the facility to fireside bullets, but you need to often make a choice from illumination and firepower. In tough spots, controlling crowds of weird beasts means alternating. If you’re being swarmed by gliding enemies that suddenly emerge from a portal, it is simple to become overwhelmed until you filter a secure path.
You start your tour of the galaxy by exploring a verdant forest environment called Tree World. From there, you go on a voyage in the course of the expected environmental tropes, traversing desert, rock, ice, and lava. The locations feature detailed foliage, intricate rock formations, and sparkling ravines covered in ice and snow–familiar but attractive locations wherein background beauty and foreground dangers are easily distinguished. Each new environment introduces a number of new monsters, but you generally take care of the identical four or five critters.
Glare offers a creative mechanic which may have given rise to a memorable adventure, but then fails to construct meaningfully on that early promise.
Monsters roam inside the alien environs, but fights against these beasts are only an afterthought. Your most fearsome opponent is the generous supply of spiked vines that flourish on each planet. Brushing against the razor-sharp barbs spells instant death, although you’ve taken no prior damage. Sometimes, those vines seem cheap in areas you’re forced to rush through, with you running or falling right into a pit of spikes you could not have seen coming, but for the foremost part, stages are designed in a way that avoids producing such frustrating circumstances. Even if you stumble across an exception to that rule, the degrees make the most of a generous checkpoint system. There are a number of cases where checkpoints are more frugal than normal, but you rarely lose much ground when monsters or spikes produce an unsightly death.
Hanging around spikes regularly may be bad in your health. Didn’t Buffy teach you that much?
Glare’s controls are every piece as responsive as they need to be in a game of this kind. You start having the ability to jump long distances, bound up walls in narrow vertical shafts, and rush down slopes. Special pedestals you return across in each level grant access to additional moves, but plenty of those enhancements don’t require direct player input. For example, you gain the power to dash along certain slopes to construct speed for you to clear wider gaps, but you do not have to do anything greater than run along an appropriate route to benefit from the benefits.
Mild puzzle elements provide occasional interludes, but such moments are too traditional to be interesting. They generally require you in finding a missing piece to a machine so as to open a locked door. To that end, you press a switch to make the piece appear and rush forward on the way to nab it in time. When you grab it, you easily place it where it must go, and the door opens. A more successful try to vary the tempo comes elsewhere, if you ride winged creatures across fields of spikes while blasting enemies out of the air. In another case, you ascend a large vertical shaft by fashioning makeshift ledges out of fragile bubbles. The sport can have used more inventive moments like these.
It is often better to leap over this fellow than to stand his charge.
At least the bosses keep things fresh. Most of them briefly turn the sport right into a twin-stick shooter along the lines of Geometry Wars. You float around an enclosed chamber, chipping away on the boss’s armor in order that its weakness appears and you’ll blast it. The foe on the end of every successive stage becomes tougher than the former one, however the process isn’t overly frustrating, and people encounters are a pleasing change of pace from the quality platforming segments that lead as much as them.
Glare is satisfying because it goes–it just doesn’t go far enough. There are just six stages in all, and the primary and last ones could be cleared quickly, especially whenever you are acquainted with them. The primary five areas each contain hidden artifacts that lie wealthy the beaten path, but there is no obvious benefit to finding them, and also you do not get to make use of abilities gained in later stages whenever you head back to early ones. Securing the next time is not motivation to go back, unless you are the sort who particularly enjoys speed runs: there isn’t any technique to easily share your triumphs with friends or rivals.
Glare offers an artistic mechanic that can have given rise to a memorable adventure, but then fails to construct meaningfully on that early promise. Here’s an entertaining pit stop that may tide you over in your journey to a much bigger, brighter galaxy.