Giga Wrecker Alt. (Xbox One)

Were you to take a quick look at Giga Wrecker Alt., finding out what the game is truly about can be a bit of a challenge. The game features the kinds of attacks, enemies, and bosses you would expect to find in an action game, a map that implies it’s an exploration-focused Metroidvania, and the amount of attention the world and story get may perhaps make for an action/adventure blend with a strong plot, but what Giga Wrecker Alt. truly is at its core is a puzzle platformer with a lot of love put into the surrounding details.

An enhanced version of 2017’s Giga Wrecker, the story begins in a world where mankind has all but been defeated by a strange robotic enemy known as the Ajeet who appeared without warning and without explanation. Enslaving some humans and eliminating any they can’t make use of, a young girl named Reika fears for her life after she’s imprisoned by them, only for another girl to break her out… and immediately threatening to kill her. The Ajeet capture the stranger before they can kill Reika, but Reika is mortally wounded all the same, only able to survive thanks to the work of a scientist who enhances her with cybernetic parts. With the new abilities her cyborg body grants her, Reika heads off into the main centers of Ajeet activity, trying to simultaneously save humanity but also learn about the strange girl who almost assassinated her. At first, this plot seem to be a pretty simple “save the world” story, Reika taking on leaders of the robot forces known as Astras, but things become much more interesting when time travel gets involved. Admittedly things can get a bit confusing as well after the ability to travel to the past surfaces, but it also allows for greater exploration of the world to occur, dead characters able to reenter the story to better explore the motivations of the Ajeet and the personalities of Astra like the dedicated armory overlord, the crazed scientist, and a young girl robot and her giant pet drill worm.  Conversations become more frequent and there are rooms hiding backstory and lore to find, the story developing into something more than just a framework for the puzzle platforming.

Giga Wrecker Alt. takes place across a rather large world divided into rooms, but the areas don’t feel too different from each other. Some will favor certain colors more than the others, with most of the backgrounds visually detailed and colorful not really impacting the way levels are laid out. The character designs are well stylized as well, but the practical points of the graphics direction come up a little short. To try and establish the grit of this futuristic setting, there is a strange filter applied around the edges of the screen that travels with the action. It may be some attempt to add grime or dust so things look a little less bright and clean, but it comes off more like you’re viewing the whole game through a camera lens that wasn’t cleaned properly. It can also be somewhat hard to identify your character when entering a new room because the camera will pan out to give you a full view of the area, busy environmental details making it easy to lose track of your character, but the focus on puzzles means that you can often take your time and find yourself without worrying about any danger.

While sometimes visually cluttered, Giga Wrecker Alt.’s puzzle design is extremely well done and readable once you know what you’re looking for. The rooms Reika travels through almost all involve some trial to overcome, these mostly taking the form of puzzles where the player must break the environment in the right way to crush enemies, activate switches with weight or by getting the right piece to the right place, creating platforms to travel across, or guiding objects like lasers or rolling saws to where they need to go. Reika’s most useful ability for such tasks is her ability to gather up the scrap from broken rocks and scrapped enemies, the amount of matter she collects determining how large or effective her different creations will be. A basic punch goes from a short range way of shattering stone to something she can use to launch a ball of dangerous scrap, but she’ll eventually learn how to change the matter into boxes she can use as a leg up to higher places, a blade for slicing things apart, javelins she can stab into walls and use as platforms, and a drill that can tear through things in a line in front of her. Even when you have all the skills though, the game ensures there are enough gimmicks in play to keep the puzzle solving interesting, new mechanics like floating gas, fluid that makes your scrap bouncy, and gears you need to connect continuing to mix in new ways to interact with the game’s physics puzzles. There are even portions where you play as someone besides Reika, a whole new style of puzzle-solving cropping up when playing with this extra character’s different abilities.

Really though, the level geometry is what keeps each new puzzle fresh, the player needing to identify how to use physics to their advantage. Cutting rocks at the right place so that gravity will move them into better spots is common, the player needing to make seesaw like platforms and managing the weight, cross paths that are being torn up by saws below, and knocking environmental pieces around to make ramps to high places or safe bridges across instant death spikes. Incredibly difficult at times, there is a hint system in place for some of the areas that can either suggest what abilities to use or show you a picture of what the area should look like when you’re done working on it. Some areas can involve multiple steps or just one smart action, and there are certainly puzzles where it’s possible to find your own way around the challenge besides the intended solution. However, the focus on breaking blocks does mean if you break one incorrectly the puzzle can be unwinnable, and while there is a restart option near every puzzle, it’s a bit slow to activate them in some cases. You get a checkpoint when entering a room in case you die during the puzzle too, but everything is reset when you die or restart which can make some of the longer or harder rooms last a little too long. As the game progresses though you can unlock new abilities, some that focus more on increasing your health or recovery rate but others giving you more control over how you place your blocks or giving you extra uses of the javelin so you can make multiple platforms, this expanding skill set further allowing for you to find your own solutions.

There is one thing that hurts the puzzle design in the game though, and it’s tied pretty heavily to the central mechanic of turning scraps of the environment and enemies into your tools. For the most part the physics in the game seem reliable and consistent, objects dropping as the designers clearly intended them to so they can be perfectly spaced for bridges or the right weight for switches. The problem with the game often cutting things so close to being just the perfect size or shape though is not your own potential failures, but the fact that things break in a rather odd way. You are able to collect the scrap from nearby with your Recall ability, but only certain types of scrap will come to you. Rubble from broken blocks will scatter around the environment as well, and if it’s too small, it’s still a physical obstacle but not one you can really influence or move anymore. This means if a small chunk of rubble ends up in the wrong spot, the puzzle’s intended solution can be sabotaged, forcing a restart. The rubble can actually help though at times, covering up dangerous spikes and allowing for creative angles in your platform arrangements, but the fact it can undermine an otherwise correct solution makes this rare problem an annoying one. Enemies have their own problem too in a similar regard. The robots you encounter in levels aren’t often meant as combat challenges, instead their destruction often being a pivotal part of or even the goal of a room. When they appear though, you can usually count on them being your main source of material for your tools, but when an enemy is killed, they explode, launching their scrap all around them. In areas with bottomless pits or hard to reach areas, this can mean a little bit of scrap might launch away only for it to turn out later your block of robot parts needed to be a single piece bigger to weigh down a weight-activated switch. Like the rubble problem, this isn’t a constant issue, but it will still no doubt impede some of your work from time to time, the great room layouts and puzzle concepts hurt by such inconsistencies.

Thankfully, the boss battles far much better, partly due to the arena designs and attack patterns meaning that nothing that is absolutely required can ever escape your grasp. While some moments of quick action and proper timing appear during puzzle rooms, the bosses are mostly focused on reflex while still being strategy focused as you must learn the design of the boss battle to overcome it. The amount of matter you have collected at one time in the game will determine the size of enemies you can defeat with an attack, so in the boss battles, you enter with no scrap and must collect it during the fight by finding out which boss attacks you can exploit to grab scrap while also knowing which ones must be dealt with in different ways to prevent incoming damage. The amount of unique boss fights in the game is small, but they remain strong by requiring active participation and gradually introducing new attacks. Certainly difficult at first, once you unlock more abilities, the late game fights can be handled better, and since the boss continues to feed your scrap supply during them, it’s all about skill and knowledge rather than that dose of luck needed in some of Giga Wrecker Alt.’s puzzle areas.

THE VERDICT: Giga Wrecker Alt. has plenty of great elements, but a few inconsistencies ended up making them harder to appreciate. Despite how busy the visual design can be, the lore and character stories of Reika and the Astras enhance a world filled with intelligent puzzle room designs. The block-breaking mechanics and scrap usage have plenty of mileage thanks to smart area design and the many gimmicks applied to them, but the solid mechanics are hurt by the more random ones. A stray piece of rubble you can’t interact with can sabotage a solution or a robot may blow a piece of matter you absolutely need out of your reach, and restarting some of the more intricate rooms can be a blow to one’s enjoyment of the game. Multiple solutions can be found in some areas to make up for it and these issues are rather uncommon, but the excellent challenges are still hurt when the focus on surgical destruction and precise placement that makes them fun to figure out hits a snag you have little control over.

And so, I give Giga Wrecker Alt. for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. Giga Wrecker Alt. can get you invested in its world and characters, it can really test your problem solving skills with some complex physics puzzles, and it can be flexible enough for players to find their own ways around certain situations, but it just couldn’t keep things quite tight enough where it counts. Things like slow area restarts can be overlooked in favor of the quality of the rest of the content, but when the core of the game has a small flaw that keeps impacting play, all the wonderful parts of it are harder to enjoy. The little issues with rubble and scrap are thankfully not enough to kill the game though, because when things work, areas can make you feel clever for overcoming them whether you used the intended method or an improvised one. The bosses make for good shifts in gameplay style without breaking away entirely from the focus on using your mind to complete challenges, and when time travel does begin to impact the story, it makes things complex in a good way both in regards to the narrative and the puzzles, new areas opening up that really put all the mechanics you’ve encountered over the course of the game to the test.

Despite some issues with misplaced rubble and enemy chunks, Giga Wrecker Alt. is a game that keeps delivering on new puzzle concepts and new world lore to keep things entertaining. It is an action/adventure game with a strong plot built out of a sturdy puzzle platformer core, the mechanics explored thoroughly so that, for the most part, this physics-focused puzzler tests the player’s mettle as well as their ability to manage metal well.