Wings of Vi Review

Unfortunately, with the addition of the health bar comes the inclusion of enemies, the masocore equivalent of strapping lit fireworks to your bicycle: dangerous, unpredictable, and likely to end in third-degree burns. Here you have a game that is, above all, about forming a routine: plan, execute, fail, repeat, refine until successful. Plans only work, however, as long as they can be counted on to do the same thing every time, and all it takes is one unpredictable element – like, say, a simple AI – to reduce them to so much hot slag. I lost count of how many times I'd come ever so close to finishing a particularly tricky section, get mini-stunned on the final stretch by a carelessly tossed projectile that I couldn't possibly have accounted for, and smash the reset button with a weary sigh before the game could even play the 'defeat' jingle. Combat as a whole actually seems like a pretty unnecessary addition outside of boss battles, and on the rare occasions that the game puts its weight entirely on it, it just boils down to flailing around and hammering the attack button like a swarm of midges are trying to set up camp in your nasal cavity. Sometimes they are; the flies in Vi's universe are brutal.

On the other hand, while my bull-headed pride prevents me from dropping down to 'easy' mode and having a chance at winning the game any time soon, I'm going to pre-emptively declare the boss battles themselves to be the peak – or peaks, as it were – of the game. Strange though it may seem, one of the most engaging things a game can do is create a learning experience, and that's fundamentally what Wings of Vi's bosses are all about. You get dropped into a room and at first you'll be lucky to survive more than a couple of seconds before being crushed, zapped, dissolved and generally demoralised by a barrage of attacks that look about as fair as entering Raiden into a log-splitting competition. It feels awful. You want to wail to the heavens about how this attack is unbalanced and how that attack is fresh steaming garbage and how Solgryn is a massive hack who relishes every tear spilled in his name. Only when you've cooled down can you start to experiment, observe, and learn. “How can I dodge this? What if I slide here? Can I bait this attack over to this side of the screen? Is there a safe zone? Oh, so that's how I know he's winding up his screen-clearing instant-kill move.” At some point in the past, it was decreed that boss battles are supposed to be big, lumbering monstrosities that put on an intimidating show but go down like a sack of bricks if you haven't recently pushed a crayon up your nose; it's up to Wings of Vi to remind us that it's infinitely more satisfying to plant your feet in the chitinous shell of something you actually had to train to defeat.

Sadly, I suspect there are quite a few players out there who can't plant their feet in anything right now, as it hasn't quite been the smoothest of launches for Wings of Vi. Just about every other day has yielded a new patch, and with each one I've found myself clicking the 'Play' button with an ever-increasing fear that my save file will have been put through the digital equivalent of a car crusher. So far it hasn't happened, though the game rather amusingly now believes that I have completed four-thousand and eighty-nine percent of the content. Even now, framerate issues abound in several areas – not totally unheard-of for a 2D game, but still a bit of a head-scratcher – and for some reason I have to reset the resolution every time I start the game. Bugs seem to have been ironed out for the most part, thankfully, although I did encounter a rather nasty one where a scripted sequence throws you off the screen if you aren't quite touching the ground when it starts. It's really fun if you like realistic examples of inertia.

But let's return to the question I've been dodging for just under two thousand words: is Wings of Vi any good? Well, in a world of obscenely difficult platformers that just throw the player in a room full of used heroin needles and slam the door on them, it's a remarkably level-headed game that actually realises the value of forgiving the player for minor slip-ups. If it's innovation you're looking for, you're moving in completely the wrong direction, but if you just want a platformer that makes you feel like you've actually achieved something – without being more impenetrable than a concrete chastity belt, that is – you're looking at a damn good offering. So that's Wings of Vi: the masocore platformer for normal people.