I was drawn to this game for two reasons: first I thoroughly enjoyed Nidhogg (developed by the same people), and second I love execution basedI was drawn to this game for two reasons: first I thoroughly enjoyed Nidhogg (developed by the same people), and second I love execution based gameplay like Dustforce or Trackmania where you replay a level over and over trying to perfect it, but unfortunately Flywrench lands far from the fun experience of hitting the retry button while telling yourself “I won’t mess up this time!”. Instead the “flywrench” you play as is hard to control, the smallest misstep leads to an unrecoverable death, and the levels become ruthlessly unforgivable at the end, but beyond any mechanical fault, the game simply wasn't fun for me in the same way as Dustforce or Trackmania is.
The basic goal of the game is to navigate small quick levels by flapping your flywrench to stay aloft while using the joystick to glide from side to side. The levels start off pretty simple but quickly expand with different mechanics, the most prominent being dodging purple barriers while pressing certain buttons to pass through colored barriers. But unfortunately not matter how much I played, I could never control the flywrench to the proficiency needed to precisely navigate stages without touching a barrier or the walls (which starts bouncing you all over the place and is nearly impossible to recover from before you hit something that will kill you), it feels like a precision platformer with terribly unresponsive controls.
When I first started playing, I didn’t mind the controls so much because the levels were really short and there wasn't much that could kill you, but about halfway through, the levels started getting longer and the path that you need to navigate smaller, but I still persevered hoping something would click and that I would eventually get better, but any improvement I showed was far outstripped by the ramp in difficulty of the levels until I gave up after completing every level up to 19/21 Mercury. And that was it, I couldn't win those last three levels and couldn't muster any interest to keep trying; I wasn't having any fun, so I quit.
Overall the game has some potential if you are into really hard and unforgiving games, but most of the time when I died, I didn’t feel it was my fault. Instead it felt like it was the the difficult controls and the unforgiving level design that was to blame, this made it frustrating to play. When I did manage to complete a level it felt like it was due to luck more than any skill on my part, sapping any sense of achievement from winning and not providing any incentive to continue on. So unless you really know you are the kind of person who loves throwing themselves at insurmountable challenges, I recommend passing this game bye. There are other games in the Steam, there is bound to be another that will love you back, beacause Flywatch sure won’t.… Expand
