In Twin Sector, players are tasked with saving their crew in the mysterious “sector” in which the protagonist has been in suspended animation for an unknown amount of time. Most of her memories are missing, so she only has the sector’s computer system to guide her. It’s unclear whether this sector is an underground lab, a floating tower, a deeps space vessel, or whatever else, but its design and layout (lots of concrete and negative space) seems to suggest a a vast underground complex of some kind.
Ashley, the heroine of Twin Sector
Pursuit
For the most part, the narrative is good. The story is verisimilar, and the characterizations make sense. However, at some points, the plot is a bit trite and predictable. The first third of the game is spent following the instructions of an anonymous computer voice, only to find out that it’s the voice of the enemy, and the rest of the game is spent trying to make it back to the core of the enemy system, so that it can be destroyed.
The character is equipped with a pair of telekinetic enhancement gloves, which allow her to push and pull objects with her thoughts. This is the only equipment she gets, and every situation she gets into must be solved with the aide of the gloves. She can use them to manipulate the objects in the area or to move herself around the environment. They are not much good as weapons, but the enemies she will face are few and not particularly complex. About half-way through the game, the player gets access to an over-charge mode that can be used to shoot energy at enemies, but the panels that make it possible only appear three or four times in the whole game.
The most common enemy is a robotic "Tracer". The best way to deal with it is to hide from it or trap it behind a door.
Many of the puzzles are very difficult. Expect to use the quick-save and quick-load features very frequently—imagine quick-loading during one puzzle hundreds of times, making only a few seconds progress from save to save. Very few of the puzzles can be solved from first glance. Most often, the player needs to die several times just to understand the nature of what what they need to do to get past that point. Most of the time, solving the puzzles left me with an elated feeling of “Yes! I finally got it,“. These were the puzzles that required a lot of thinking and planning to get right—however, some of the puzzles instead required an excessive amount of timing, control agility, and luck. Those left me simply glad that they were over with. The final puzzle was of this second type, and it was challenging to the point of annoyance, which, combined with my slow load times (See below) made it difficult to want to bother finishing the game at all.
Some puzzles seem impossible at first glance.
The health system is done right. If the player gets hit too much at once, she dies, but otherwise, she heals up within a few seconds. This is, I think, the best way to deal with health in a FPS puzzle game. If the character had hit-points, and needed to find health packs periodically, it would have added another layer of difficulty that this game simply doesn’t need.
You'll be seeing a lot of this loading screen.
Panorama
The character models seem a bit off. I’m not quite sure what it is about them, but they remind me somehow of models from older games. When I look at them bit by bit they seem fine. The skin is properly textured, the bodies are proportional, the hair moves correctly, etc., but watching them in motion during the cut scenes, just makes me feel like I’m watching a cut scene from 5-6 years ago.
The character models look like they come from another era of video games.
Occasionally, the lighting would seem off. I’m not sure if it is done for stylistic effect, or if it’s a rendering error, but occasionally things just seem lit from the wrong angle, or casting a shadow that doesn’t quite fit. Otherwise the environments all looked good. Every level pretty much looked the same, but there was enough distinction in the design, that one doesn’t get lost in the levels, and I think the constant concrete surroundings give it a very desolate drab, creepy feeling, which is appropriate for the atmosphere of the plot.
Gimmicks
The left glove can be used to pull things around, even the player's character.
The main appeal here is the interaction mechanic. Each glove can be charged up by holding the button down, with more charge causing a stronger pull or push. The stronger the charge used, the longer it takes to recharge the glove. The left glove is for pulling, and the right glove is for pushing or throwing, with each glove being controlled by it’s corresponding mouse button by default. The basic mechanic was, of course, similar to the Half-Life physics gun, but it has been made more granular, and easier to control. The most fun use of the gloves is for getting around the levels. The character’s movement speed is pretty low for an FPS, but since everything within range can be targeted with the gloves, one can simply pull or push on the walls to get around. This is even more fun in the low gravity areas.
The right glove is for pushing. When falling a long way, it can be used to cushion the impact.
Reigns
The player can also rotate any item she’s holding, by spinning the mouse wheel. There were several times in HL2 when I wished I could rotate the item I was holding, and had to drag it along a wall or pick it up from a different angle to make it happen, so this was a nice thing to include, and became essential in some of the puzzles.
The direction that a held item is facing can be important to solving some puzzles.
Occasionally, I found myself wishing that the “Interact” button could be assigned separately from the “Primary fire” button There are several points in the game where I found myself accidentally activating a button when I meant to use my glove and vice versa. The buttons in the game are also very small, and have to be aimed at directly to actuate. This is actually where some of the more annoying puzzles, especially the very last one, get their excessive difficulty.
Noise
The music works well. It is not a single song or string of notes that plays over and over—rather there are several different simple tunes, reaching various levels of creepiness. They fade in for different types of puzzles, or in different dangerous situations. Sometimes during down moments, the music fades out completely, only to bring itself back in quickly when a new danger arises. Not only does this lead to more variety in the music, but the music becomes part of the experience, even cluing the player to their current dangers, and the pace of certain movements through the levels.
The voice acting is only mediocre. The three primary characters in the story all have good actors behind them, but it’s as if they were given the lines on different days, and weren’t given the whole script. While read well, the inflections and tones are often entirely wrong for the situation that the character is in. That’s bad directing, not bad acting.
Encoding
My load times were really bad. I would sit on the load screen for as much as a minute, every time I needed to quick-load, even if I had been in the game for only a few seconds after the last quick-load. However, I’ve been noticing that my load times seem to be longer than other people in a variety of games, so this might just be me.
I found that if one stands in the way of a closing door, it would sometimes push the character through the floor of the level.
Last Word
The gloves don't work under water.
Twin Sector is only an okay game. If you really enjoyed Portal or the physics puzzle portions of Half Life 2, then you’ll likely get some fun out of this game too, but only if you’re not the type of person to get easily frustrated.
Articles RSS