N++ Review
I’ve been playing N++ and it’s great. I hate it and I’m awful at it but it’s great. My first experience with the N franchise was N+ on the 360 nearly 10 years ago. Thankfully, N++ is all the fun I remembered along with some new stuff. N++ is still based around the same fast-paced platforming with some physics. You build up speed by using your momentum and you maintain that speed by quickly chaining jumps and wall jumps throughout the environment. Throughout the level, you can collect gold bits that add on extra time for you to complete levels. If you’re feeling dexterous, you might be able to get through a level quick enough to not need them but each level has both a time goal which posts to a global leaderboard, and a badge for collecting 100% of the gold dots. You might find that your initial run through the levels with feature a mix of both but subsequent runs will most likely be about getting either as fast a time as possible or as complete as possible.
While mastering your character skills plays a big part in the game, you also have obstacles in your way. These start as simple as mines or spots that turn into mines to drones that do a variety of things that you won’t enjoy like chasing after you, firing a machine gun at you, firing a laser at you, firing a homing missile at you, or, and this is the most frustrating, floating along a fixed patrol waiting for you to inevitably jump into them. Mechanically, any one of these things isn’t so complex that it’s too much for you to even think about but once you start playing levels with drones that constantly chase you as you weave through mines while also tap dancing around lasers, you’ll quickly realize how difficult some of the levels can really become. To be quite honest, I didn’t even beat all the included levels and I’m not sure if I will because they are very demanding.
In terms of just content, N++ has a lot to offer. Even if you’re me and you don’t finish the last 50 levels, you would have gotten through hundreds of stages through the core game and there are even more legacy levels from previous games as well as community made levels created via the in game map making tools. I tried exactly one community level and I couldn’t even make it halfway through. There are, of course, easier levels but if what you want is a challenge, N++ and the community at large will deliver.
The passive competitive options are pretty minimal. There is seemingly a global leaderboard but it doesn’t really update dynamically. Upon completing your levels, it will show you your positition but it wont go on to update afterwards. You could still be the fastest person on a level but you wouldn’t know unless you potentially beat the level again. The arrangement of the levels is also less than optimal because you play levels in a set of 5 called an episode but there is no individual tracking for each level when you do that. If you want to set individual level times, you’d have to go into each level individually and set them. The act of playing the levels is fun and challenging on it’s own but having leaderboard competition would be very nice. In terms of other options, it doesn’t seem like there’s any kind of online multiplayer, which was in N+. I could be 100% wrong about that because I have no friends therefore I wouldn’t have been inclined to try it anyway. There is local multiplayer support where you can not only play the level on the same screen but also fire missles at each other when you die because your friends are dicks? Again, no friends, so I didn’t get first hand experience. I’m sure it’s great. If a friend is up for a demoralizing experience, there are strictly coop levels which, if they’re anything like N+, will be the worst thing you can do with a friend in a video game. You won’t hate each other but you won’t feel great either. Maybe your friend will hate you, actually.
N++ is a hard game to get wrong. Even if all they did was re-release N+, that might be good enough with how simple the game is. But they didn’t do that. They added in just enough to make N++ feel both familiar and new. My frustration aside, N++ is a game that by the end will force you to push yourself to be more quick and precise which isn’t something I can say about many games I’ve played. If you like platforming games, especially ones with a certain degree of challenge, N++ isn’t something to pass up.
Plus plus.
N++ was reviewed on PC with a code provided by the developer.
