Fluidity is one surprising little Wiiware title. On the surface, it’s just another physics-based puzzle game, but it ends up have more in common with Metroid than anything else as you gain more and more abilities. And just like in Metroid, at the end of the game when you’re finally all powered up, you feel like a bad-ass. A bad-ass puddle of water.
At the start of the game (oh, how that feels like it was so long ago), all you have is this puddle of water that you control indirectly by tilting your remote to tilt the level itself. Your puddle of water will slosh around and behave like water should, and you can make it jump by jerking the remote upward (the only flaw in the controls: it doesn’t always seem to work when it should). Your goal will be to collect Rainbow Drops and to achieve that, you will have to solve simple puzzles: find a rubber ducky and bring it to a bathtub, navigate through watermills, douse some fires… simple stuff.
But that is just the beginning, as you will soon begin to collect new abilities, the first being the water bomb. By pressing and holding down a button, you can make all your water gather together, which opens up all sorts of platforming possibilities. What’s more, holding down the button long enough will make the ball of water explode in all directions, useful to reach certain places and knocking away obstacles.
Eventually, you will gain the ability to transform into a block of ice, and again, that new form will open new challenges and puzzles: you will be knocking down crumbling walls, using launch pads that will sent you flying at dizzying speeds, pressing down switches, and more things your liquid form couldn’t do. And at some point, you will gain the ability to become a cloud and fly freely through the levels, though you will not be able to push switches or move anything with more mass than a balloon.
There are several more abilities to gain for each of those states, but I don’t want to spoil them. All I will say is that you will be impressed by the variety and the versatility of your moves by the end. It was hard for me to even remember what the early gameplay was like, because I have been sliding and swinging and slingshotting my way through the game for a while, now.
There are over one hundred things to collect in the game, but the game is by no means a collectathon: each Rainbow Drop will have to be earned. You will have to solve puzzles that are at first simple, but become more and more complex as you progress. The puzzles will involve several steps and have you switching from state to state, yet they never feel like busywork. They never seem to repeat. They simply flow naturally: as you complete one step, the next one becomes obvious, until at the end you collect your reward. It feels rewarding every time, even if they are not the most challenging. That said, there are several real head-scratchers in there that I have no clue how to tackle, thankfully you don’t need them all to finish the game.
Fluidity has really taken me by surprise. There is no flash here, it is one of the most unassuming games I’ve ever played, with its calm music and simple visuals, but there is true depth to be found in it. It is also the lengthiest single player adventure I have played on Wiiware so far, with no padding. It does not recycle its own ideas over and over, and instead constantly reinvents itself.
Yep, as soon as Club Nintendo is back up I'm downloading this. Playing inFamous 2, Arkham City and Zelda all in a row was exhausting! This game will be perfect.
I wasn't overly wowed by the demo, but I've heard nothing but glowing things about Fluidity, so I'll probably buy it. The descriptions of it that I've heard do sound good once you get deeper into the game.
You have to be way too precise. For most of the game, the motion controls work fine, because you're only solving puzzles. But then there will be sections where you'll have to navigate a cloud through a maze of spikes while dodging Goo-Hornets (or whatever they're called), which I find really frustrating.
@Secret_Tunnel Exactly. But the Nintendo community has decided collectively to champion this game as the crown jewel of WiiWare so it's probably a waste of time pointing out the glaring, obvious flaw this game has in its control scheme. 10/10 or bust.
The thing is, I don't think there was even a chance for this game to get much collective consciousness because next to no one played it. A few random people tried it on their own and had a ton of fun with it. To you a waggle jump might be a "glaring, obvious flaw" but to me it honestly wasn't an issue. And the game itself was brilliant... it was basically a puzzle-based Metroid type game with like 20+ hours of unique gameplay.
Honestly, not many downloadable games can even compare.
@Simbabbad It is a flaw when you map a basic function of the game to a motion that could better be done with a button press. de Blob was no different. And I played all the way through de Blob. de Blob calls itself a platformer and the jumping in the game is the worst part of the game.
@Simbabbad Everything is subjective. I'm not going to start including 'in my opinion' whenever I want to say something about a game so I don't hurt people's feelings. I'll probably give Fluidity another go since it's mine permanently and I can't trade it in or anything, but as of right now I think the jumping controls are intolerable and the controls are flawed because of it. Maybe my opinion will change in the future, but I doubt it.
I dunno, I guess they could have mapped it to a button but by the end of the game you have so many powers there really aren't any buttons left. Whatever the case you're free to feel however you want of course, but if you start suggesting that there is some Nintendo community consciousness that is willfully overlooking a severely flawed game for one reason or another then I have to question where that is coming from. Wouldn't the more logical answer be that a lot of people just genuinely enjoyed this game a ton?
The reason I said that is because Radio Free Nintendo hyped this game up pretty good too, plus given this board's opinion about the game, had me looking forward to playing it. Then I spend some time with it and realize it is a 2-D Metroid-style game with crappy jumping, and I'm wondering who at Nintendo thought waggle-jumping was a good idea. So I stick with it and I start getting more and more irritated with the controls until the game is genuinely starting to upset me. I had the same reaction when IGN Wii gave World Of Goo their GOTY in 2008 over Brawl, which to me was laughable and was IGN's way of backhanding Nintendo for that year. I think WoG is somewhat overrated, but the Nintendo community championed that game as the best game on WiiWare. I didn't really think it was that great. Not bad but certainly not GOTY material.
Yeah but I don't get why you would assume that all of these people are like blatantly overrating this game that is killed by motion jumping or something. Again, isn't it more logical that it's really just not as big of a deal to most people who have played the game?
I'm not saying that people should have necessarily completely panned the game because of the jumping. I'm saying I'm having a hard time understanding why it wasn't even mentioned when, to me, it is a terrible design decision. A couple people on this board have admitted the jumping could be better. But 10/10, best game on WiiWare. I'll admit I haven't a lot of time playing WiiWare games, but really? I think the hardcore user base of any console has a tendency to gloss over faults of highly regarded exclusive games.
As Simba said though, only 1 person here gave it a 10/10, and that is Guillaume who doesn't use decimal points in his scores. It has a 9 average here which seems about right to me. And I do recall a lot of people were talking about the jumping back when this game released. It just clearly didn't bring it down to them the same way it brings it down to you.
Feel free to write your own review, anyone. Sorry for apparently misleading people.
But: yeah, really.
This right here:
Gui said:
There are over one hundred things to collect in the game, but the game is by no means a collectathon: each Rainbow Drop will have to be earned. You will have to solve puzzles that are at first simple, but become more and more complex as you progress. The puzzles will involve several steps and have you switching from state to state, yet they never feel like busywork. They never seem to repeat. They simply flow naturally: as you complete one step, the next one becomes obvious, until at the end you collect your reward. It feels rewarding every time, even if they are not the most challenging. That said, there are several real head-scratchers in there that I have no clue how to tackle, thankfully you don’t need them all to finish the game.
It is also the lengthiest single player adventure I have played on Wiiware so far, with no padding. It does not recycle its own ideas over and over, and instead constantly reinvents itself.
is why I gave it a ten. The jumping being a bit unreliable wasn't enough of a problem for me to dock the game. Its achievements are far greater. Pick most downloadable games and they'll either be short, or padded, or repetitive. Fluidity is none of those things.
