POSTED 2/8/11


INSANELY TWISTED SHADOW PLANET

Fuelcell Games
Xbox 360/XBLA

Ack ack, ack-ack-ack-ack. Ack! Erm hang on, our babel fish needs a tweak. Ack-ac... oochy-coo. Much better!

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet opens with a little green bag straight out of Holland... erm, we’re sorry, we’ll write that again. Crazily Mangled Dinge Asteroid opens with a little green man compressed into his discular spaceship (picked up for a song from Honest Abe’s ’50s Sci-Fi Propstopia) before heading off wild black yonderwards to rain havoc on raven-toned crapulence that’s bleurghinating his planet. Obviously he’s no Public Enemy fan...

Ooh, and what a world it is, shadowy trespassers or no. Imagine the art styles of Patapon and World of Goo colliding, chuck in some Limbo then attach it to gameplay reminiscent of Pixeljunk Shooter crashing into Metroid-like tunneltastic exploration. Spacey-shooty-puzzling – woo!

If judged upon appearance alone, Loonily Garbled Gloom Globe would be the Bo Derek of pixels. Mercifully though there’s a decent game underlying the style. You control that aforementioned stereotypical spaceship and its gradually burgeoning arsenal, including a pop-pop gun needing an oomph injection to picky-uppy pincers, a giganto saw blade that makes mincemeat of mincemeat – and, handily, rocks - plus a handy WTF?-o-ray that makes up for the game giving NFI what to actually do save for assigning these weapons to different buttons.

Despite detours – some devious - containing useful and non-useful bonus stuff, things are quite linear. Still, when that line leads to spectacular boss battles that rely on smarts rather than wooshnificent trigger triggering, we’re not whining. Deaths are infrequent despite increasingly dastardly and plain fucked-up adversaries, as little yellow health-boosting foofs are plentiful.

For dark is the suede that mows like a harves... erm, THUMP! Ah we love percussive therapy. Right, uh, Irrationally Gnarled Adumbration Sphere is mighty fine eatin’... THERUMP! OK, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet’s far-out!

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