Just released on Xbox One for a price of $14.99 and a part of the ID@Xbox family we love so much here on the site.

 

Nebulous is a physics based puzzle game from the developers over at Namazu Studios. The game originally was published on Steam then was later ported to PS4 and now it has made its way to Xbox One, and here we are with the review.

 

Nebulous is a pretty straight forward puzzle game and if you played games like Portal or Peggle you wont have much trouble with this game.

 

The game involves the character Commander Dash Johnson getting lost in space after a spaceship accident and he needs to navigate through complex mazes to find a escape. In order to help him out you need to arrange particular pieces of each puzzle to help Dash bounce to a wormhole which leads to another puzzle and eventually end of the game. While doing so you will hear funny one liners from Dash, complaining of pain from each bounce or the fact he is in that predicament.

Now when this game was originally made, it was made for Oculus Rift Support (VR headset), which leads to a weird play style if you don’t have VR which in Xbox's case, there is no VR headset support. Honestly that’s a kinda big problem if you ask me. When you start the game you immediately notice something is weird about the game, which is the VR layout on just a normal TV. Each puzzle is spaced out across the screen and you can switch playfields left or right. The camera is placed as if your viewing this map in a first person perspective, and you can't see the entire puzzle in one frame on your screen. You must look up, down, left and right to see the full puzzle. On a normal TV this looks very strange especially in the way the game controls on Xbox. Even menu options and gameplay features such as the play button for a map are laid out as if the player was using a VR headset to look up and left, or right.

 

Even after all that I still gave the game a fair chance and was pleasantly surprised. Each map get progressively more complex and I myself am particularly fond of puzzle games so this appealed to me. Each puzzle is well thought out and with multiple playfields that equal to two to three part puzzles I was pleased with the actual gameplay. Each puzzle is like a maze and using the pieces to navigate to escape is pretty fun.

Trial and error is a big part in the gameplay as well. The levels have a 3 star rating that score you on time taken to complete the puzzle, number of tries and number of star in the puzzle itself you collected. There are 5 sections with 10 levels each. The first few levels show you the basics then it dives into more difficult puzzles as you go on.

 

I give a thumbs up to the puzzle designer for making well thought out puzzles as well.

 

Graphics wise as I stated before the visuals of VR ported to a regular TV is very off putting. Besides the weird porting the actual graphics are quite nice, each background is vivid with stars and planets spanning the background, each map is well laid out and the pieces are nice and bright with good texture as well, I just wish the developers changed the camera view and controls to better suit the console players.

 

Sound wise the music is good but nothing really stood out to me, maybe I was just paying to much attention to the puzzles to notice. The funny one liners from Dash Johnson were a nice feature though, it was nice to get a good laugh or two every so often as you navigate Dash through the levels.

 

As for achievements there are 11 achievements, spanning from completing each section to a few mystery ending achievements, unfortunately I was unable to find any info anywhere about the mystery ending so I can't speak on that. Other than that the achievements are pretty straight forward and you won't have much trouble getting at least 800 Gamerscore from the game. The game retails for a price of $14.99(or your region equivalent) and is available now on Xbox One.

 

Final Score - 6/10

 

Written by John, Aka YoDz

 

Twitter @AkaYoDz  Gamertag: YoDz

 

A code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review

 

You can purchase Nebulous on the Xbox Store Here

 

Release Date - Wednesday‎, ‎November‎ ‎16‎, ‎2016

Price - $14.99

Download Size - 1.05 GB

 

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