Dustforce

Quick Note: If you are looking for detailed inormation on what the game is, check out the Quick Look: Dustforce

Dustforce is an amazingly fun game that ignites my burning desire for perfection. Not many games come around that actually capture my attention like Dustforce. You can play for 5 minutes or you can lose a couple hours without realizing it. Each map is only 30-90 seconds, but the fact that you keep wanting to restart it over and over again to get a perfect rank of S.S. will keep bringing you back constantly and makes it truly worth the $10.

The gameplay feels solid as you race through each level. Even though the maps only take 30-90 seconds, it's the fact that you will keep trying over and over to master them that you will inherently dump a lot of time into a single map and not realize it until you look at your watch. There have been a few times that I went to play just for a few minutes and realized that I not only did my few minutes fly by, but another hour went as well.

Controls are decent, but a little tuning would be nice via an update. I use the Xbox 360 when I play and think that the tuning of the analog stick could be a little more refined. Sometimes it feels like the character doesn't listen. I could be mashing the stick left and the character is just sitting below the top of the ceiling only for myself to realize that if I had gone 1 more degree on the stick, the game would have recognized what I wanted to do. If you are looking to double S rank and get the quickest time, I would suggest building that thumb muscle back up if you are playing on a controller. It's probably pretty weak nowadays since button mashers are far and few between. Now this game is not a button masher, but if you want to kill some enemies quick, you will need to press as fast as you can.

Sound fits perfectly to the game. Nothing is obtrusive and flows very nice. The music accompanies the game beautifully. It feels like the music fits just like how the music in Sonic the Hedgehog fit it.

Graphics are crisp and clean and the animations are smooth. I did not experience performance issues that some are/were talking about. It could be that there was a patch prior to my purchase.

There are some issues that I think should be patched.

• When using a controller, the up and down directions should have their play area trimmed a little bit and added to the left and right directions. This is just a personal request, but I feel that it is off.
• More keybindings. Even though I have everything possible mapped to the gamepad, I still have to use the keyboard to pull up the menu by hitting escape and then am forced to go back to the controller to navigate the menu because you can only have 1 key assigned to an action at a time.

All in all the game is well worth the $10 if you are a completionist/perfectionist. There is only 1 achievement and it is for perfectly clearing every map. That to me is an achievement to go for.

Reviewed On:

• Intel Core i7 - 960
• 16GB of RAM
• Nvidia GeForce 480 GTX
• Windows 7 Professional