This month’s Tentacle Award goes to the best of a trio of high quality platformers that all arrived within a week of each other: TIC: Part 1 (Platformance: Temple Death and Fluffy: Operation Overkill completing
the triumvirate). But TIC hovers above the crowd with its spectacular 2.5D graphics and solid flight-based platforming.
The world was peaceful, its landscapes were serene, the forests were lush, the air was clean, and then along came the malicious oil-hungry aliens. They did what aliens do best: pollute the environment, strip the planet of the resources and make life generally unpleasant for its native mole people. Alright, it’s perhaps a bit heavy handed, but it’s a good excuse for our heroic unicycling robot to save the planet.
The objective is to destroy the oil drills that are terrorizing the mole people, but in order to do that, you’ll first have to collect enough silver acorns to power Tic’s drill. Unfortunately silver acorns prefer to hang out in incredibly inconvenient locations, so you’ll have to utilize his unspectacular flying ability in order to collect them all. I say unspectacular because spinning the propeller rapidly drains Tic’s energy, meaning he can only fly for a few seconds without perilously plummeting to his
demise. Thankfully, there are plenty of red acorns floating around that can refuel his energy in midair.
Much of the platforming involves whimsically hovering the robot from red acorn to red acorn in the air while avoiding the nasty drill enemies and collecting silver acorns. It’s quite a lot of fun, and although the platforming does get pretty intense and challenging, there are plenty of checkpoints and unlimited lives, so success is really just a matter of patience and a bit of adaptation.
Flying and drilling through the world is a real treat thanks to the game’s fantastic graphics. The level of depth in the backgrounds really brings the world to life. The only real problem with the game is that it ends all too abruptly. The three campaign levels can be completed in around forty minutes, and although there are challenge modes present, I really look at a lot of that stuff as filler. I hate to bring up the whole Limbo ‘time vs. dollars’ argument, but I just feel it’s worth mentioning so that everyone is aware of what they’re getting. This is one of the best games on the platform, and a few dollars to support a talented developer making a fantastic game is money well spent.
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