Curved Space (Xbox Series X)

Curved Space is a twin-stick space shooter with a literal twist. While your vessel does need solid ground to move across, the way that ground can curve and bend defies gravity. Going upside-down, moving cleanly across a Mobius strip, or escaping danger by driving up the nearby wall, so long as there are no barriers blocking you, you can move your ship all around the small arenas you fight your battles in. To keep away any queasiness the levels do remain fairly limited in size and concept, but when you can see even your bullets bending to the contours to hit enemies in nifty curved shots, you start to appreciate just how warped the layouts can be.

 

Curved Space’s campaign can bend and twist in some interesting ways to match the action, although at first it might not even seem like it’s going anywhere. Set in a far future, humans harvest a vaguely named Energy to power their technology, but this earned them the attention of abstract alien spider creatures. Realizing the spiders were filled with that useful energy as well, humanity switched to killing two birds with one stone, getting their precious resource by harvesting it directly from the creatures who are trying to stop them. You are playing as a female engineer with no stated name, and at first she just helps you learn the ropes of the game when she speaks. The story takes an actually interesting turn though where suddenly she encounters multiple versions of herself, all of them having an odd sense of deja vu about this story. What is actually occurring is you’ve reached the campaign’s junction point, where you select one of the three alternate versions to represent your character while you then choose how you want to aid the other two. Branching points are added between most every level going forward, giving you a chance to take a few truly different paths through the plot that will feature a few unique arenas and boss fights.

 

Curved Space’s campaign isn’t an overly long affair and you can even exit and resume the campaign later if it is still too much for one sitting. This does make trying to see the alternate paths more feasible, but at the same time, Curved Space makes a well-intentioned blunder that discourages repeat plays. The first levels of the game’s campaign ease you into the action, teaching you the basics and rolling out crucial weapons and skills only after stages that are more tutorial than trial. If you want to see those alternate story outcomes, you’ll have to push through levels that served their purpose well initially but only drag things down by sticking around, especially since Curved Space quickly becomes a more energetic and responsive shooter once you’re out of that slow starting stretch. At the same time, while each path is technically unique, their divergences aren’t so pronounced that you feel like you’re missing out for not diving in and taking the alternate routes. They’re likely best treated as something you return to later down the line, Curved Space thankfully offering a few different modes to occupy you if the gameplay hooks you.

At its most basic, Curved Space is just about defeating the enemies who appear in the gravity-defying arenas. Sometimes the shape of an arena can be a hindrance, usually when it helps obfuscate where enemies are and you’re just trying to hunt down the last speedy one to clear a stage, but there are levels where instead you’ll appreciate the odd bends and turns as they give you unique escape routes or ways to blindside enemies who usually won’t pester you too strongly if they’re out of sight. Some stages are much flatter than others and a few like the asteroid don’t feel too out there with the fact you can drive all around its surface, but your speedy little fighter craft is easy to maneuver and aim using the controller’s two control sticks. It does have two inherent abilities, disregarding the tutorial waiting to dole them out that is. The dash is a simple burst of speed in a direction, this gelling well with potential upgrades like one that lets your dash reflect projectiles back at attacking enemies. The more interesting and helpful tool synergizes well with the dash though, the lash a unique attack option separate from a range of weapons you can acquire.

 

The lash ties into the campaign’s story, this being the way you harvest energy and spiders. An energy lash will burst out of your vessel like a leash of lightning, snagging on any eligible spider or dynamo nearby. Grab a spider, and not only can you leach some health from it, but you can lash it to other enemies to increase the potency of the leech. The lash is used for one of the game’s slower objectives, attaching spiders to dynamos to drain them of their power, but the lash also benefits heavily from the upgrades you get periodically. Once you have a more capable lash and dash, the two can make for an absolutely deadly combo. Snag the target, dash into them, and you can obliterate even some of the stronger enemy types, although this is usually because you invested in upgrade choices like the dash having boosted power or the lash being more capable when it comes to grabbing tougher foes. Upgrades are definitely a crucial part of making your spaceship as capable as it can be, levels ending with a chance to pick from a small random set of them. With the right choices, you can up your damage to the level lash and dash sequences can help you clear a whole wave of foes, but there are boss monsters and special objectives that will sometimes pull you away from utilizing the lash too often. The lash can even see special use against bosses though, like linking an almost tornado shaped creature to a dynamo to move it about or yanking the legs of a truly massive spider out of whack.

 

While the lash can end up being your most effective attack option, it is one that can take some time to get going in pretty much every mode on offer. It does allow you to tackle tougher difficulties, but you’ll still likely be leaning on your vessel’s standard weaponry as well. When defeated, enemies can give you a few things. Passively you’ll build up energy for an overdrive state where you can launch enhanced weapons with impunity for a time, some spiders might leave health pick-ups, but the ones that drop weapons reveal a pretty varied arsenal. While you have some pretty standard energy blaster shots and some perhaps expected sci-fi weapons like a flamethrower or charge laser, Curved Space does concoct some more inspired picks. An energy scythe you wind up and then lunge forward to slash enemies with, a javelin shot that can stab through enemies and carry them until they hit a wall, and quite a few variants of plasma shot like a shotgun blast or something called the Sandblaster that just peppers the area in front of you with constant weapons fire. Some weapons use ammunition while others are free to utilize as often as you can fire though, and while it is neat to see what a new weapon with a strange name does, it becomes pretty clear Curved Space is best handled by finding the two best weapons you can carry and settling into using them exclusively. Likely these will be ones that are simple, effective, and don’t use up ammo, and since weapons do carry across levels, you end up in a situation where you want to stick to your guns but that also simplifies the fights some since there’s less pressure once you’ve found your favorites.

Curved Space does at least provide a range of weapons to feel out, but the enemy diversity isn’t quite up to par. While the generic name for the alien menace is “spiders”, they do come in many shapes and forms. Some are actually large pillbugs or centipedes instead, others may still look like abstract arachnids but are tougher or have a unique attack or two. However, even when something tries to urge some lash usage or moves in a different manner, it doesn’t change up the action all that much and you’re left playing levels in a pretty similar manner. The arena shape does lead to some variation and the game does try a few weak shake-ups like turret rounds where you point at the bugs for nearby turrets to handle the firing despite that not being a large change in design, but its the enemies who do feel like they needed broader concepts. You’ll inevitably even face some bosses multiple times no matter the run, but the game does at least crank up the enemy abundance so that a foe that might have been easily handled before has a retinue to protect them and actually show off what small gimmick they might have.

 

Settling down into your preferred weapons against an enemy force that isn’t too varied does sound worrying, but at the same time, it does mean that Curved Space can start to become the kind of twin-stick shooter where it’s easier to zone out in a good way. The action keeps you active and involved but it starts to become second nature, the player slipping into a flow state supported well by the pumping techno soundtrack. This is where Curved Space benefits from having a few different modes on offer. The Arena is perhaps the weakest admittedly, the game setting up specific challenges where you have a very limited amount of time to defeat all the enemies under special rules, and since often the conditions are something like utilizing only one weapon type, you can start to really feel the limits of something like the slow-firing sniper shot and it ends up more a matter of playing perfectly instead of tackling a tough challenge. Daily Run, Survival, and Endless are better when it comes to valuing the player’s input. Survival lets you pick an arena and try to survive as long as possible in it, the waves getting gradually harder but you’ll be able to gather upgrades and slowly accrue your preferred weapons, and if you stick it out long enough, you’ll even find the Extreme difficulty kicks in and starts to apply ammo limits to all weapons. Endless is fairly similar but constantly shifts its levels, while Daily Run shifts around to provide a one-time challenge for you to see how well you can place on the leaderboards.

 

The leaderboards do reveal something about Curved Space though, mostly by the fact I was placing in the top 5 fairly easily on my first attempts of a mode in a board that isn’t even barren. Curved Space is definitely a different game if you don’t keen to the value of something like lash and dash or fail to carefully consider what upgrades and weapons are the best. Rounds can feel much more demanding even before the lategame if you’re stuck with weaker options and even when you’re well-equipped the action has a lot of kinetic energy. However, it does end up in a middle zone of effectiveness because of this, casual players perhaps turned off by the need to strategize in a game with already odd arena shapes and experienced players can slip into it too easily and hold their own against opposition that is slow to reach their level.

THE VERDICT: Curved Space is the kind of energetic twin-stick shooter that will suck in some players for constant revisits while other players bounce off its concept fairly easily. The baseline shooting works well even with the twisty arenas that evoke Super Mario Galaxy‘s gravity trickery, and the campaign having multiple routes was a promising idea if not handled the best. However, it is the mix of enemies and weapons that make the difference on whether the game will grip you. While the lash and dash combo is universally strong and a good choice for a common feature, figuring out the weapons and upgrades seems to deter some players while those who embrace it might find the spiders you face struggling to keep up with your compounding strength.

 

And so, I give Curved Space for Xbox Series X…

An OKAY rating. The campaign’s universal branching paths match some of the mind-bending arena designs fairly well for giving this space shooter a bit of a shake-up, but they’re also alterations that don’t play as important of a role in the moment to moment action as the weaponry, upgrades, and spider types. It is satisfying to gradually grow into the kind of powerhouse that doesn’t even need to fear the monsters you face, but at the same time the tools are there are a bit too early because the spiders don’t increase in danger or complexity enough to match your growing power. Bosses are thankfully an effective enough interruption in that they are more involved skirmishes and Curved Space could have benefited from not trotting the same ones out so often, but the most important decision that kept Curved Space from becoming truly repetitive is the game’s quick energy. You’re still moving about and unloading attacks even when you can more quickly fry each wave of foes, and it’s actually things like the turret rounds or energy harvests that harm it since they break the rhythm of the action with their slower paced play. Curved Space could do with escalating earlier in its longer modes like Survival and Endless though and Campaign needed to place you at or at least closer to the junction point where things get more interesting, but it feels like Curved Space was always destined to be about finding that flow state. Curved Space can be a good game to return to from time to time for simple thrills, the action asking for you to be reactive but you don’t need to think much about it since your own controls are so simple. The moments where you pick upgrades or weapons don’t pull you out too much, and even the winding arena shapes usually can be navigated swiftly enough that those hunts for the last spider don’t turn things into a drag.

 

Whether you should get Curved Space is truly a matter of what you expect from a shooter. Its structured content like the campaign and challenges aren’t handled the best, but the gameplay fundamentals are there to make its longer modes with the only end being your doom actually more enticing since they let you embrace the neat combos achieved through good weapon and upgrade choices. There are even modifiers to apply to make things more difficult and increase your score as a result, but introducing new elements like spiders that explode on death still don’t shake the action out of the comfortable zone it finds itself in. Looking past the unusual physics bending the battlefields out of shape, Curved Space is mostly about the simple excitement of constantly tearing through enemies. The action is involved so your actual actions are important to success, but since the game doesn’t demand you to look too closely at what you’re doing, the monotony can’t catch your eye too strongly as you’re focusing on shooting down spiders alongside motivating music.