Review: Life of Pixel

Posted by Curtis H on January 15th, 2013 | 12 Comments | Tags: Life Of Pixel

Update

While we have a policy of not giving a game a new score based on patches released, we do like to inform our readers about changes made to titles if they massively alter how a game performs or plays. Such is the case with Life of Pixel. You can read Curtis impressions of the game post patch here, he now says “It feels complete in ways that I don’t think the original release did.”

Life of Pixel aims to take players through the history of video games. One could also say that it will take players through the history of broken and poorly designed games. If there’s one thing that Life of Pixel does succeed at it is that each console world in the game does feature graphics that fit the look of said console. It’s unfortunate that nearly everything else about the game is either broken or fails at creating any sort of compelling gameplay.

Life of Pixel puts you in control of the character Pixel who, while visiting a museum, goes on a journey through eight retro video game consoles (and one handheld). Each console contain eight different levels featuring a graphical style that represents games from that period. As Pixel you’ll platform through stages collecting diamonds to unlock the door at the end of the stage. Each stage also has a gem that is usually placed in a location that is a little harder to reach. Later stages also feature buttons that flip gravity sending you flying towards the ceiling.

Technically speaking Life of Pixel is a mess. After playing through about three stages you’ll notice the game slows to a crawl. It feels as if you’re moving in slow motion and it’ll continue that way until you completely exit out of the game and restart it. There is absolutely no excuse for this. It is completely insane to think that, in order to finish the game, I had to close out and reboot the game more than a handful of times. And even when you do go through this fix to make the game run at a normal speed again it only lasts for a few levels before reverting back slow motion city. On top of that there were numerous times where I got stuck in walls, fell through a platform, shot up through the floor, and there was even one instance where the game randomly kicked me back to the Live Area forcing me to redo the previous stage.

The problems don’t end there. Life of Pixel is simply a poorly designed game from top to bottom. It is filled with cheap deaths, some of the worst ‘leap of faith’ jumps I’ve seen in a platformer, controls that don’t always work when you need them to and flat out terrible level design. Throughout the game I found myself dying over and over again because I had to make a jump to a platform that was impossible to see. Sometimes I’d miss and in other instances I’d just hit an enemy that, just like the platform, was also impossible to see until the last second. Other instances I’d go to use a double jump and the second jump just wouldn’t work at all. It felt like about ten percent of the time my character would simply refuse to double jump which, as you might guess, resulted in my death. Levels are filled with jumps to no where, enemies that you won’t see until you’re already dead and a handful of other things that lead to a cheap and untimely death. This isn’t gameplay that hearkens back to a retro era. These are all things that we shouldn’t have to deal with. You can have a difficult platforming game without ‘leap of faith’ jumps and you don’t need to have cheap deaths. It starts at good level design and this game does not have that.

Life of Pixel is a difficult game but it’s difficult for all of the wrong reasons. It’s broken, poorly designed and, despite being less than two dollars, is not worth anyone’s money. And that sucks. As far as PSM games are concerned Life of Pixel had a neat concept that should have turned out much better. At the end of the day there’s no excuse for the technical issues that I ran into. Life of Pixel is broken and should be avoided.

A copy of this game was purchased for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation Vita version of the game.

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