This FPS Puzzle Platformer pushes all the wrong buttons
Magnetic: Cage Closed, begins auspiciously inside a prison cell, where the player’s first choice is to proceed, or die. From there, the nameless character is taken via shuttle to a gaol-cum-weapons testing facility. Two voices accompany you through the game; the prison’s Warden, and its resident head-doctor. Why? Because you’re a criminal, for some reason, testing weapons to use in a nuclear war of some kind.
The plot makes a few nods to experiments by Pavlov and Skinner, mocking the pointlessness of it all, even asking “would you kindly put down the magnet gun?”. While it lampshades the conceits natural to videogames, merely highlighting these necessary contrivances doesn’t make its useless story any more effective; it only undermines the plot, and eradicates any reason to see what few branching choices there may be in the ‘psychological evaluation’ sections.
Gameplay relies on quick reflexes and sharp wits, as you navigate trapladen rooms using the magnet gun to solve puzzles by pressing cubes against buttons on floors, walls, and ceilings. Not since Crystal Dynamics’ Soul Reaver has the gaming world seen a title so enamoured with cube-puzzles.
Unlike a gravity gun, the magnet gun obeys Newton’s third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Attracting and repelling objects works both ways, letting players navigate by pulling or pushing themselves to strategically placed magnetic tiles. While the gun has three power settings, from weakest to strongest, there is rarely reason to use anything but the most powerful. The gun fires boxes in off-centred arcs, which only adds to the tedium when you find yourself constantly missing the target.
Death comes for us all, and in Magnetic, it comes quick and easy: spike traps, wall-mounted flamethrowers, floors covered in chlorine gas, you name it. While these sorts of traps are common to platformers, poor hit detection means you’ll often be stabbed or burnt to death when the offending booby-trap is inches from your screen.
The gameplay is a textbook example of why FPSers generally make for horrible platformers; there’s no edge gravity, no sense of placement, no ability to grab ledges. Guru Games could have learned a lesson or two from Mirror’s Edge. Instead, we have a game that’s neither a good platformer, nor a good FPS. What’s worse, scarce checkpoints mean every death quickly builds into an ever mounting sense of frustration and rage.
Magnetic has a few interesting concepts that fail to live up to their potential. The constant loading corridors and crawlspaces may be a part of the game’s button-pushing Pavlovian mindscape, but it fails to soar past the mark, feeling more like a compilation of ideas used out of context; to paraphrase what Roger Ebert said of Battlefield Earth, the developers learned from better games that these conventions can be used, but they haven’t learned how or why. ALESSANDRO GUARRERA