Dustforce

[epmode]

This will be released on Steam within the hour:



Rock Paper Shotgun already has a review

It’s pretty exciting to already know one of your games of 2012, midway through January. And it’s always exciting to have a game that compels you to play the same levels over and over and over and over and over, despite the fact that it’s over two hours since you needed to go to bed, and your hands hurt from thumping your desk, because you have to get a bloody “S” on this level because… because you just do! That would be Dustforce.

With the engagingly silly premise of a 2D side-scrolling platform game where you play a janitor, the overall goal of Dustforce is to sweep up all the mess in a level. But forget whatever images of a game that conjures up in your mind – the dust, be it leaves, fluff or green chemical goo, is the motivation to perform some of the most rewarding platform parkour I’ve ever seen. The dust are the targets to hit, automatically collected as you so elegantly swoop over it through levels, skipping off walls to dart along ceilings, double-jumping between floating dust beasties who you bash to bits, and swooshing down steep hills to make spectacular jumps into seemingly unreachable gaps.

Just played as an A-B platformer would be to wildly miss the point of Dustforce. While there are a few levels that make that task alone pretty tricky, most you’ll be able to run through without too much of a struggle. Instead, the goal here is to sweep up every scrap of dust along the way. Except, actually, that’s not it either. The real goal here is to get through the level, sweeping up every scrap of dust, without letting your combo drop. Combos are pretty simple – you can’t let too long go since you last swept something. If you don’t run over some dirt for a few seconds, the number dramatically drops out of the bottom left corner of the screen. You can keep going, and the first time through a level you probably will. But it will hurt.

It uses Steam leaderboards and automatically records ghosts which are viewable by other players, omgomgomg.

[Hero]

Color me interested!

[MechDeus]

The soundtrack is really what sold me on this. Pretty excited!

[YellerDog]

Fuuuuuck yeah Dustforce. "Like N+? So you wanted Super Meat Boy to be more complicated? So you like really hard platforming games with ~ WALL JUMPING ~ ?"

[sedition]

Been looking forward to this. I'll pick it up when I get home from work.

[MechDeus]

It's awesome.

+have to do well in order to unlock levels
+checkpoints can be turned off for an easier time doing speedruns
+crazy level of air control and wall/ceiling grappling

-background colors are sometimes too close to foreground colors, can be hard to tell what's what (could be my monitor, I'll play on the TV later)
-the move that clears everything doesn't always clear everything, which can completely fuck a speedrun if it's performed in the final room and misses a spot
-turning on a dime is not as instantaneous as I would like

[epmode]

-the move that clears everything doesn't always clear everything, which can completely fuck a speedrun if it's performed in the final room and misses a spot

That RPS review says that this move only hits things that are in your dude's line of sight.

[Dunlap]

It's only 9 buck today, I bit. Going to give it a go later today.

[MechDeus]

That RPS review says that this move only hits things that are in your dude's line of sight.

There was nothing blocking the random square in the middle of an open floor that got missed for me. Regardless, it only happened once out of like ten times, so it hasn't been a real issue yet plus I got hit earlier that level so it would've only been another A/S ranking anyway.

[Shine]

I'll wait for it on 3DS.