Razed, from developer Warpfish, is a fast paced, rage inducing and colorful platformer where you must reach the end of each level as fast as humanly possible.
You start the game and are immediately strapped into a pair of power shoes — forcing you to move faster than light across the ground. These shoes aren’t powered by magic though. Instead they have their own batteries and charge which allow you that super speed and grant you the ability to make huge jumps and even drift. The only issue is that once you run out of charge your shoes will explode. Luckily, however, these shoes are powered up by moving around quickly — as long as you make fast and direct decisions you should last just fine, until you fall off of a platform that is.
The game has six different worlds — each with their own visual style, each full of color and challenges along the way. Whipping around collapsing pillars, jumping gaps, and strafing along thin pathways, all while keeping up your speed is quite the challenge in Rezed. Not only do you want to get the fastest speed possible, but your life depends on it, so you must make snap decisions and figure out the layout of the level as you go. This forces you to learn on the go, and results in a lot of ‘just one more tries’ before you manage to complete the level and move on to the next level.
The demo version of the game which I played at PlayExpo Manchester and later at PCGamer Weekender in London both had me repeatedly falling off platforms and challenging my friends to best my times. Razed is full of challenge but it is challenge worth taking on. The game even has boss battles at the end of each world (not that I, personally, made it that far).
See if you fare better than me and make it to a boss battle to clear through to those new areas — or just enjoy the challenge of each individual level. Razed will definitely challenge you, but it is definitely an enjoyable challenge.
If you’d like to follow the development of Razed, you can follow @Warpfish on Twitter or check out their website.
