by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Razed
  
• Developer: Warpfish Games
  
• Publisher: PQube
  
•  PS4, PC, Switch
  

Razed hides a lot behind its difficulty. It’s easy to look past its loop of trial and error platforming with its near instant restarts, or forgive missed jumps as a mistake on your own part. But this hides a simple fact: Razed lacks the visual communication and consistency that you need to make a good platformer.

One of my immediate frustrations with Razed was its energy system. Life is tied to your speed, gaining speed increases energy and slowing down depletes it. Get too low and BOOM, you explode. Problem is, ANY action you do takes a huge chunk of it, including jumping. Ya know, that thing that’s the core of every platformer?

By default jumping takes up over half of the energy bar, meaning that quick jumps in succession weren’t possible. Trying it met me with a jarring error message sound that chided me for being so arrogant. Later abilities, like the drift or stomp, didn’t take up as much energy, but still felt restrictive. Using them often left me without enough energy for another action at a critical point.

Instead what Razed wanted me to do was maximize my speed by hitting the right driving lines and minimizing how many actions I took to get to the goal. There were plenty of points where I could have drifted or jumped, but if I didn’t take the harder path I’d immediately explode. Routes need to be planned so that I could make it to the other side and still have enough time to build speed and energy back up in preparation for the next area. Which would have been a lot easier if I could see the next area.

Razed’s combination of speed, fog, and sharp turns made that impossible most of the time. Draw distance is shortened by fog, obscuring the immediate path. More troublesome are the frequent right angles and U-turns demanded from the level design. These sharp angles work well with Razed’s low poly, geometric artwork, but they make turns unforgiving and prevented me  from seeing beyond the next turn. Which lead to a lot of trial error as I died trying to find out exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

The rinse and repeat cycle of time trial platformers is familiar by now, and the now standard instant restart takes the edge off some, but it obscures the underlying problems with the stage layouts. At times I found myself launched into the air, falling to my death and not understanding what happened or what I needed to do until reaching the same area two or three more times and dying while trying to parse it.

One particular jump took forever. I had to jump onto a spring into the opposite direction then try to parse the path forward as the camera spun around and trying to catch up, and if I started moving too late I’d immediately plummet to my death. Turns out I couldn’t find the next platform because I’d launched off the spring at the wrong angle, which pointed me away from the track instead of towards it. Which gets back to the problem with consistency.

I’d often take the same action and find myself getting wildly different results. Take springs for instance–the angle I hit them from wildly changed my trajectory, and most of the time if  I didn’t land dead center I’d be thrown to my death. Well, ok, most of the time I hit the side of them and died instantly because the edges are also instant death spikes for some reason. Even jumps can vary wildly. I frequently jumped from the same spot only to die–either because I’d turned slightly too much and lost speed or didn’t launch myself at the right angle.

Its collisions aren’t even consistent. If it wasn’t enough that I couldn’t tell why I didn’t make a jump, sometimes I’d clip the side of the stage and fall off. Or hit the corner of one of its right angle turns and die. Slopes are the worst, with physics becoming really unpredictable, and requiring countersteering to push against gravity, which is real dangerous given how fiddly the handling is.

Razed asks so much precision movement and leaves so little margin for error, but poorly communicates exactly why you got a result each time. It’s so demanding it makes basic jumps a challenge, instead of leaving space for improvement. I never wanted to try a stage again, because just getting through them was so exhausting.

For me, the ideal time trial game makes navigating a stage manageable, then leaves space to return and improve my time later with the skills I developed. Instead Razed demands ridiculous precision from the go without earning it, and even locks away upgrades that make it easier behind more difficult challenges.

Maybe there are people who enjoy this kind of trial and error. People don’t mind their time being wasted by cheap deaths and poor communication, and can put up with only understanding a level in increments. But for me Razed is wasted potential–a decent core dragged down by inexplicable restrictions that make every movement into a punishment, instead of an expressive tool.