At Light Speed is a single-player sci-fi platformer with a simple premise, yet it also promises to take you on a breath-taking interstellar adventure, filled with exploration. Does this space romp truly deliver or does it fall short of its cosmic potential?
Charting a Course Through the Stars
The first thing At Light Speed does is to present you with a clear message: “You are stranded. Find a ship. Escape.” After that, the captivatingly simple premise is set: get your astronaut safely across the space debris. Like I said – simple, right? WRONG! At Light Speed stretches your reflexes to their utmost extremes, often threatening to push them to the very brink of their natural limits before forcing you to kick yourself for missing your landing by a quarter-millimetre.
More specifically, you are required to use a simple set of abilities to reach your destination. These are: jump, jump boosts, and antigravity. That’s it. It all sounds too simple, but it most certainly is not!
I found that an accurate way to describe At Light Speed is a frustrating precision puzzle platformer, but that’s not necessarily said in negative terms. It’s just one of those games where you need to be prepared to die a LOT before you reach your destination.
The controls make it easy enough to get started, but difficult to master! The core gameplay of At Light Speed revolves around mastering the art of momentum and gravity manipulation. You must navigate a series of intricate levels, utilising a variety of acrobatic manoeuvres to overcome obstacles and reach distant platforms.
As touched upon already, At Light Speed boasts simple mechanics which all ultimately address using gravity to navigate around fiddly levels. The controls, although simple, can become complex when needing to use multiple features in quick succession. Something that I found baffling was the inability to double-jump by pressing the space bar twice, once to jump then again mid-jump to jump again. The ability to double-jump in the traditional way has been removed, attached to a separate button and rebranded as “gravity boost”. This takes a lot of getting used to because I kept finding myself almost constantly hitting space again mid-jump to achieve a double-jump, only to plummet down into the unknown instead of making it to the next platform.
On the note of falling, this was something that I found immersion-breaking. The concept that you could fall despite being in space, and not being on a large celestial body which has its own gravity (which would then explain it), seems bizarre. Falling whilst in space isn’t something that seems possible – things just float. This may well have (perhaps) been an oversight, but it’s nevertheless distracting each time it happens. Unless, of course, the platforms that you are navigating all have their own micro-gravity, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Simple Yet Stunning Visuals
Visually, At Light Speed is absolutely stunning to look at, with a vibrant colour palette. There is a lot going on on-screen at any one moment as you look across the vast expanse that you need to navigate, and it’s hard to not be both simultaneously impressed and scared. In other words, it’s difficult not to get drawn in by the beautiful, intricately simple visuals whilst trying your best not to perish!
A Swift Test of Patience
At Light Speed is brief, yet offers a number of ways to traverse each level, which keeps things fresh and interesting. However, there are no difficulty levels or modes to choose from, meaning that once you have seen what the game has to offer, then that’s it.
However, speedrunners may find At Light Speed to be a good game to work on as it fits perfectly within the discipline and the tight navigation coupled with the timer in the upper corner lend themselves perfectly to speedrunning! With that said, it also only really appeals to those who aren’t prone to rage-quitting as At Light Speed can indeed be very taxing indeed!
Conclusion
At Light Speed is a short but solid sci-fi platformer. Once you have explored the game in full, there is little reason to return and the precision required can become infuriating. However, At Light Speed makes it clear from the very onset what it is about – getting from A to B as safely as possible. With adorable art design and a great soundtrack to accompany it, At Light Speed is a great title to dip in and out of.
Pros
- Stunning visuals.
- Great audio design.
- Intensely fun.
Cons
- No story.
- Can quickly become infuriating.
