Arcade-style game experiences are still with us today regardless of the decline of the arcade cabinet industry. Games like Geometry Wars and Trials HD still have the power to hook gamers with their competitive leaderboard-driven addiction. The one more quarter! and I’m close to beating my friend’s score! is still with us today and when done right - if one has the right group of dedicated friends who care about their leaderboard score - can have almost an infinite amount of replayability to the user who craves that kind of competitive gaming. radiangames latest title, Fluid, tries to tackle this genre and provide a similar experience, but Fluid can also serve as a case example that one crucial missing design feature can bring a game to fall short of its full potential.
Fluid is very similar to other arcade titles, specifically Pac-Man. You try to outrun various extremely hostile enemies and try to collect all of the items on the level to continue to the next stage. Instead of increasing your high-score, it’s much more in the style of the popular Xbox Live Arcade Game Trials HD where you’re trying to shave seconds off your time and try to get the fastest possible level-completion time.
In the game you control a tiny tadpole-esque creature, and you have to steer it around the map from a top-down viewpoint at a breakneck speed to try and collect various pellets spread out across the level as fast as possible. The trick here is that every time you collect a pellet, a host of evil little pellets will spawn from the area where you collected the pellet and will proceed to chase you, with the ultimate goal of your murder on their mind. But you can fight back, as you can use power-ups that can give you the ability to grow bigger than them and smash them, or to even create a horrific black hole to suck in your enemies leaving you free to roam the level without the threat of harm (until the black hole collapses and spits all of the enemies back out).
Fluid feels more like a “designed” experience, and this feeling stems from the amount of control you have over each level, you don’t have any say in crafting your environment or when you can use power-ups. The level is already in place, speed-boost ramps are in their designated areas, and as soon as you touch a power-up you use it. Fluid, more than anything is about understanding how exactly a level works and thinking creatively of how to use the pre-constructed environment to your ultimate goal of getting a quicker runthrough of the level.
The core gameplay is fun and smooth, and will have you constantly trying to improve your time…unless you desire a competitive leaderboard-driven structure. The ultimate flaw that trips up Fluid is that it contains no online leaderboard system for which to compare and compete against another people’s scores. This is not an unheard of feature in Xbox Live Indie Games, as Haiku Interactive’s fantastic title AvaGlide had one of the best online-leaderboard integrations I’ve ever seen of any game, and the lack of said feature removes the competitive nature from Fluid and in the end kills much of the replayability one could ring out from this game.
Without the competitive hook, Fluid is merely a well-designed arcade experience that will only last you 30-45 minute. There are five unlockable “Extreme” levels that can only be accessed after you get a certain ranking in the 30 other “Normal” levels, but I found that the levels were not extremely difficult and just felt like more of the standard levels. If you’re an inner-completionist that finds joy in acing all of the levels without any outside motivation, then you’ll find a lot of fun with Fluid's solid gameplay and surreal visual art-style the is practically a trademark of radiangames’ titles. But if you’re someone like me who replays Geometry Wars multiple times because your friend’s score isn’t that far from yours and you know you can beat it if you really put your mind to it, then you’ll finish Fluid and probably never return to it.