Biped Review (Nintendo Switch)

Review code used, with many thanks to HomeRun PR

Story/Characters

BiPed LadiesGamers.com — *Meet Aku and Sila!*

Aku and Sila are the most adorable robots I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing! This little bipedal twosome is tasked with restoring a number of galactic beacons scattered across the Earth, in all sorts of weird and wonderful locations. To guide you along this charming journey are a number of other bipeds that serve as advisors, assistants, and occasionally obstacles. All of the bipeds lack any real personality, but they’re still oddly cute and a pair of Aku and Sila figures/plushes would look awesome on my desk!

Gameplay

Biped has such a nice, basic control system – the left stick is your left leg, and the right stick is your right. Everything is done with some combination of movements of the two, from simple walking to complex actions such as swinging from ropes and operating foot-count-triggered adaptive platforms. It’s very effective, but damn does it get awkward sometimes! One stage got really difficult, where I had to swing from one rope to another, proving that the right application of simple controls can still be a brilliant challenge.

While fun and effective, the controls did feel slightly awkward. I suspect this is due to the fact that the control sticks are offset, making manoeuvring as though walking feel unnatural. This was lessened when played with a Pro controller, as the sticks are closer together, but both the Lite and handheld Switch felt strange and wrong under the thumbs. Some levels, such as one where you have to walk to control a boat, just felt awful. As in, throw the controller across the room in a rage awful. Most of the time the game was fun, but sometimes it just became anger-inducingly tedious and frustrating.

Graphics, Sound, and Performance

Biped’s depiction of Earth is adorable! A clean art style, vibrant colours, and pretty vistas set a lovely tone for this indie puzzler. Between that and the perky, chilled out music with cute little sound effects I suspect Biped was supposed to be relaxing as well as challenging, but honestly, I spent most of the game too frustrated to truly enjoy the wonderful settings.

For the most part I didn’t have any performance issues, either in docked or handheld. However, I did notice a fair amount of chugging and bouncing in the boat level mentioned earlier, as well as flickering shadow textures in the desert-type level. While the shadow texture issue was only mildly annoying the chugging in the water level was absolutely frustrating, especially when combined with the utterly ridiculous viewpoints I was occasionally faced with. Why would you move the camera to the next section when my character is still mostly in the previous one?!

Difficulty

Biped is a game that, with enough time and perseverance, can be relatively easy to complete. No matter how many times you die you’ll always respawn, and even when the game kills you (the joys of physics games) it sometimes works in your favour by getting the player just far enough to make the next checkpoint before finishing flinging you off a cliff. What is incredibly difficult, however, is completing all of the extra tasks. Each level has 3 – a time challenge, an optional extras challenge, and a lives lost challenge. The time one in particular always seems to me like an absurdly low limit, one that you’d have to practise the level many many times over to achieve. I was too annoyed by the time I finished a level to go back and try for any of the extra challenges, but if you’ve got the patience I’d love to hear if you found anything special for doing them!

Conclusion

Despite some noticeable performance issues, utterly frustrating controls at times, and sometimes ridiculously hard sections, I actually found Biped an enjoyable game. I wouldn’t recommend it for a young audience though; it’s too demoralising, as just holding a direction for a fraction of a second too long or sometimes even the game itself flinging you too far off a ramp can mean death. It’s cute, quirky, and I love the idea, but it needs some tweaks and polishing before I’d go back and try for the optional challenges.

Final Verdict: I Like It

Story/Characters

Gameplay

Graphics, Sound, and Performance

Difficulty

Conclusion

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