Going into Infinite – Beyond the Mind, by developer Emilie Coyo and publisher Blowfish Studio, I expected a pixel art shoot ’em up, but I guess I was hoping for something a bit more engaging than what I got. The game is your standard side scrolling action game where you defeat enemy soldiers by slashing them with your sword. Your character, a choice between sisters Tanya or Olga, is equipped with a few abilities including slashing, jumping, dashing, and a few more as you progress through the game and unlock them. Fight through level after level, destroying tanks, helicopters, and the occasional boss fight along the way.
While on the surface, Infinite – Beyond the Mind sounds promising, the combat unfortunately doesn’t really do it for me. I’ll admit I had a lot of fun in the first few levels hacking and slashing away, but it very quickly became a tedious task, especially given that the game uses the outdated mechanic of game overs. Each level has two main sections and a boss fight. If you die on a given section by losing all nine health points, you’ll respawn back at its start. If you lose all three of your lives, though, you’ll restart at the beginning of the level. This is especially frustrating when you’ve spent 10 minutes traversing the first two sections only to get two or three chances at a boss fight that a lot of times has an instakill such as falling off a cliff or into lava.
I think this sort of punishment system is extremely archaic, and this game would be much better without it. Let each section be its own respawn point and don’t make me repeat full 10-minute sections just because I haven’t figured out the boss’ choreography yet. Moving on from that, my second main complaint is the repetitiveness of the gameplay. I think even without the game ove mechanic, the levels are too similar to each other. You don’t get your first extra ability until level 4, so that leaves you with about 30 minutes of the same single slash. I would love it if there was more variation all around. The boss battles, for as short as they were, were a great escape from the norm of the rest of the game. I was also pleasantly surprised when one level took place in a plane versus on the ground. More levels like these, or at least fewer game overs, would definitely improve the experience.
Besides the gameplay, I really enjoyed the art style of Infinite – Beyond the Mind. The characters are chibi pixel art, but the background is more gritty. This contrast is pretty interesting, especially at times when the characters blend into the background to hide. I saw a lot of good indicators and was never confused as to what I had to do. Everything was very readable.
All that being said, I wish I could have enjoyed this game to its fullest extent, but being forced to repeat levels I’d already shown competence in made the whole ordeal very frustrating. There’s a difference between being hard and being too punishing, and I think this game is the latter. Unless you’re into games like this, I would say this is a game that you can skip without missing anything. What I got was fun, but I just wanted more.
6/10
Check Out the Infinite – Beyond the Mind Trailer:
Infinite – Beyond the Mind is available for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
For more information, please visit: https://www.blowfishstudios.com/game/infinite
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I am an aspiring game designer looking to explore the philosophy behind game creation. Some of my favorite games include Overwatch, Super Smash Bros, Portal, and Beat Saber.
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