Game Reviews

Fluid SE

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| Fluid SE
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Fluid SE
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| Fluid SE

After about 30 seconds of playing Fluid SE you realise it's not what you thought it was. At first glance it's another neon-hued arcade game that's all about staying alive for as long as possible.

But after that half a minute you realise that it's actually a cruel racer. This is the sort of game that taunts you with fractions of a second.

It pushes you to cut corners, forces you to take chances, and gets your adrenaline pumping in ten second bursts.

It's tough as well, often making success feel like slightly less embarrassing failure.

This is an angry, Pac-Man-style explosion of gold snaffling, blob avoiding, and desperate clock watching.

Fluent

The game is split up into five-level chunks. You need to earn enough stars from the levels you've unlocked to open up the next bundle. There's a degree of grind to proceedings, but everything happens so fast it's hard to complain.

You control your ship with a stick on the left of the screen. A button on the right zooms out the camera and gives you a little boost.

There are streams of golden orbs woven around the levels, and you need to grab them all as quickly as possible. Better times mean more stars, and more stars take you closer to the next levels.

On most of the levels collecting an orb releases a thick blobby ghoul that chases you until you've grabbed all of the glowing balls. A single touch from one of these and it's game over.

Beating your own time is one thing, but moving up a star-level is sometimes worthy of a fist-pumping cheer.

Maze-ing

Different levels have boosts that send you shooting forwards at break-neck speed.

There are power-ups that protect you from the annoying ghouls, and portals that warp you from one side of the screen to the other as well.

Everything is slick and tightly put together, and the controls are more than capable of dealing with the demands the game puts on them. You can even tweak them in the options menu.

Fluid SE won't be to everyone's taste. It's a little too sharp, and a little too cruel. But if you're looking for an angry, short blast of arcade gaming, it's a solid bet.

Fluid SE

A fast-paced and relentlessly hard racer, Fluid SE is well worth your time
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.