T Raiders

Games are often full of ups and downs, but they don't usually make a feature of them.

In this respect, T Raiders is unlike any other platformer you've ever tackled. Yet, it also manages to beg, steal, and borrow from scores of them, adding a touch of nuttiness to each and every feature along the way.

You're given three playable characters, the entire bunch seemingly lifted from a second-rate anime series. Initially, running and jumping are the only tools in your arsenal as you make your way through the game's short, sharp 2D stages.

As you move from level to level, jumping becomes just a small facet in what is literally a mind-bending platform-puzzler.

Your job is to find the three keys dotted around each stage so you can leave through the big golden door that acts as the finishing line. Additionally, yellow nodes can be collected to boost your score. There's also the odd lucky orb that doesn't seem to do much apart from briefly flash "lucky" on the screen.

Running around is only the half of it: it's the fact that you can turn the world upside down that dominates your time more and more. You can actually tip the orientation of the game by 90-degrees. Swiping up turns the screen, with the direction of your swipe supposedly determining just which way the axis tips.

This makes previously unreachable parts of the level accessible, with what was a wall suddenly becoming the floor, and vice versa. The problem is, there are also plenty of hazards dotted around each stage, including spikes, fire, and an assortment of baddies roaming the halls, all of them fatal to the touch.

While avoiding said pitfalls is simple enough to begin with, tipping the level one direction or another has the potential to drop you straight into the jaws of death.

This is further complicated by the fact that it's often impossible to see what potential traps lie around the corner if you decide to tip the axis. Much of the time you're acting blind, switching the perspective out of curiosity rather than design.

T Raiders also has a habit of misreading your input, sending you crashing straight towards whatever hazard you were trying to avoid.

It's an interesting setup that causes you to stop and think in ways other platformers simply don't manage, and when it works T Raiders feels rather special. However, there doesn't appear to have been much thought put into its implementation.

The whole thing feels loose. It doesn't feel as though the level design is tight. Hazards have seemingly been thrown into levels without proper tuning, so that even when an action looks safe it may end up being dangerous. You're essentially thrown into haphazard levels and left to figure out the solution.

While this arguably lets your creativity blossom, it also means T Raiders has no sense of structure. Stages feel like the result of a level from your average Mario clone having been tossed around in a salad spinner.

The resulting mess, seemingly spewed out at random, leads to the odd moment of magic, but it also means the kind of educated design invested in 2D platformers of old is sadly absent here.

It's up, it's down, it most certainly spins you around, but T Raiders's focus on freedom means your feet are never quite stuck to the ground.