Urbanix (PSP)

Qix is a satisfying old arcade game focused around area control. By boxing in more and more of the play field, you aim to control a certain percentage of the territory while avoiding the hazards moving around the screen. It’s a game that visualizes progress really well and can be tackled with a few different approaches, and like many early popular arcade games, clones would soon follow. While many were released around the same time as Qix, nearly thirty years after its creation, Urbanix is a modern copycat that retools the game into something a tiny bit different.

 

Urbanix still focuses on the same style of play at its heart. Controlling a cartoon bulldozer, the player is plopped down in a mostly rectangular play area. However, the shape and arrangement of this changes between the games 150 levels, later stages including new ideas like differently shaped level boundaries, inaccessible areas, and closed in areas existing within the level already. Using the bulldozer, you lay down road to box in areas of land, cities springing up once you’ve completely cordoned off an area. The area doesn’t have to be a perfect square either, allowing for some more winding shapes that seize opportunities for additional captured land, but it is important the player doesn’t get too greedy, as the dotted red line trailing behind you used to represent the construction you’re working on can be touched by enemies to destroy your bulldozer. Once you have filled in a certain percentage of the level as represented by a somewhat unclear gauge in the lower left, you can move on to the next level, the goal being to get the most points possible before you lose all your lives. However, if you have completed a level, you can return to it any time you wish and start a new run from there, giving you the option to simply try and see every level on offer instead of just chasing high scores.

This is pretty much just a light alteration to Qix so far, but there is on all-important feature in the original arcade title that is missing. In Qix, you can view the entire play area all at once. There is no ambiguity about how much space you control or where enemies are in Qix, but Urbanix completely tosses away this vital gameplay component for a closer camera that completely destroys the appeal of the play style. With changing level layouts you can’t really know what you’ll be driving into as you move towards the borders of the PSP screen, meaning completing your shapes requires blindly scouting off into the level where you’ll be vulnerable. The car enemies racing around inside the level can’t be seen while offscreen or anticipated either, making it incredibly likely you’ll be blindsided by one zooming in after its path was diverted by an odd barrier bounce or, even worse, you just didn’t know it was present at all until it killed you. Every level has a timer, the later levels expecting more turf converted to city in smaller and smaller time periods, necessitating risky movement to grab massive land claims. This means you have to constantly drive off into the unknown and pray you won’t be caught unawares by the enemy cars, their own numbers increasing in the later levels as well.

 

Already, having the screen show so little vital information is likely to make anything outside the early levels of each of the three worlds frustrating, but it doesn’t stop there. There are two more enemy types who are essentially just nuisances rather than interesting obstacles to progress. The housecrashers are wrecking balls that will drive along the roads you create to demolish built cities, undoing some of your claimed territory that you can’t get back. You are meant to drive down your road and chase them away, a prospect that is made difficult to manage with tight timers and the sometimes maze-like road paths you’ll make just trying to claim enough land in time. The flying sharks are paradoxically better and worse than the other enemies. They’re unavoidable, flying towards you and snagging you in their teeth to shake you around. You can escape them quite easily by mashing L and R, but while they are the easiest enemy to deal with, they are also guaranteed time wasters that waste precious seconds and give housecrashers time to destroy the cities.

In a very weak attempt to provide something to assist the player instead of hinder them, the game provides power-ups, none of which it explains. In fact, Urbanix is very threadbare when it comes to any explanations or tutorials, what little text there is mostly just being the game warning you cheekily that it’s making things more difficult. You can glean the uses of the power-ups eventually through experimentation at least. Wrenches will give you an extra life, a shield will make you temporarily invincible, and items that slow time or give you the ability to boost aren’t too bad in concept, but they can’t overcome the awful design choice of making a game about territory control and area denial have such a limited view of that all-important space. Even closing in areas with your roads can have complications. If enemies are in both halves of a split space, no cities will be built, meaning you have to further segment your areas. Getting in to these small occupied boxes to split them further is a fair enough challenge, but if the game has placed a boxed in area itself with no city present yet, splitting it will have the game arbitrary decide which equal sized half to populate with buildings, cutting it down more and more proving to be an inefficient but sometimes necessary use of time in later stages.

 

Perhaps the biggest joke in Urbanix’s design is how it splits up its 150 levels. The first 50 take place in a grassy lot with no gimmicks, but the two other worlds featured are a North Pole area and one on the Moon. The major difference between these three worlds is not something interesting like new enemies, mechanics, or hazards, but how many times you’ll need to box in an area to claim it. In the North Pole levels, your first go over the snow smooths it into ice, which you must then box in again to make a winter city. On the Moon, you must first clear up some of the rocky surface, then place some mechanical foundations, and then the moon base will appear on the third retread of boxing in the same area. This is pretty much repetition for repetition’s sake, the game further straining its timer and enemy design with this bland attempt at increased difficulty. Perhaps even worse, if you drive into an area that has smoothed ice, metal foundations, or smooth moon rock, you cannot drive off into ground of another type. You must complete an expansion of your road boundaries before you can get out of the area and move off to find more space to claim. The first few levels of the new worlds do pull back the difficulty featured in the final levels of the previous world, but they get just as annoying to complete afterwards as the game keeps hurling too many impediments at you while not providing you decent means to handle the situation.

THE VERDICT: Urbanix is a sloppy attempt to add a twist to Qix’s classic gameplay style. The mild impacts of the power-ups and the levels having different shapes and layouts are potentially the closest it comes to good additions to the area control gameplay, with everything else only being annoying and detrimental. Enemies who exist just to waste precious time or undo progress and worlds where the difficulty is amped up just by requiring constant repetition of an already somewhat repetitious play style are bad enough on their own, but once the incredibly close camera enters the picture, every aspect of the game is worsened. The game asks for risk-taking and quick action but denies players the means to see important information that would make taking such risks anything more than luck-based.

 

And so, I give Urbanix for PSP…

A TERRIBLE rating. Many terrible games have one fatal flaw that intensifies the other issues to create an awful experience, and Urbanix’s is that oh so simple problem with how much the player can see while playing. Driving off into an ever-changing unknown is not a play style that allows for intelligent play or proper reactions. The fact your trail is your weakness and enemies can appear and hit it without you having much recourse means these necessary scouting moments are often suicidal. If you try to just go for small claims in your viewing area, you’ll find the timer and percentage requirements push too hard to try and make you take risks you can’t afford to take. Urbanix does have a few levels at the start of each world that are decent enough, but once it starts adding more of its deliberate nuisances to the picture, you’ll find it has taken a deep plunge into aggravating design, one made worse by the fact two-thirds of the game demands a considerable degree of repetition to complete.

 

Even when it was released on systems like the Wii, Urbanix didn’t opt for expanding the viewing area, and it is at least easy to understand the likely reason that choice was kept. The main thing that sets Urbanix apart is the cartoon cities you build in the enclosed areas, and if you were zoomed out enough to see the entire play area, the cities wouldn’t look as nice or be as interesting. However, this focus on the looks came with sacrificing perhaps the most important components of the area control play style, the visibility of progress and the ability for the player to identify dangers and claim turf in spite of them. If the camera had been pulled back there would have still been more issues than nice additions to Qix’s template, power-ups and stage designs too plain to overcome a very hostile difficulty curve, but at least then the player would be able to see what they’re meant to do.