A Tennis-Infused Platformer With Half-Baked Levels
What do you get if you cross a platformer with a tennis game? It’s less a joke and more a brilliant idea for a budget platformer. You can almost see Shigeru Miyamoto skulking in the background, taking notes for a future Mario costume.
Pad Quad is an unconventional platformer that has a copy+pasted a tennis player into the role of main character. And what can tennis players do? They can use their rackets to bat balls back. Or, in this case, projectiles. We can imagine Mario in his Mario Tennis whites, batting back the fireballs of piranha plants.
30-Levels-To-Love
We can’t double-fault it as an idea. The 2D levels of Pad Quad are filled with tennis ball machines that have gone rogue. They fire balls in your vicinity, and you can tap the X button to forehand them back. Not only have you defended yourself, but you’ve countered with your own salvo.
I’m a big fan of how Pad Quad and Afil Games embrace the idea. They know that enemies have a tendency to wander off, so your returns are like homing missiles. A floating blimp can still be hit with a well-timed slice. A tennis ball is also a convenient method for flipping switches. Time it right and an enemy’s attack can be used to take out that enemy AND toggle a lever. You can impress everyone by nullifying a level while barely taking a step into it.
While you have a racket and aren’t afraid to use it, the sentient ball machines have their own counter-measures. Projectiles can bounce from floating launchers, or be spun through gears to redirect in your direction. Latter levels can be a blur of balls, requiring a clearout of a launcher or two to progress.
Levels That Are Less Wimbledon, More Wimbledon’t
Everything we’ve just written is what Pad Quad gets right. The tennis aspects are more than gimmicks: they make Pad Quad a more skillful game. Getting good at dropping down between tennis ball-trajectories is essential, and the same goes for timing your return volleys.
I just wish the rest of Pad Quad wasn’t so routine. It’s clear that the components of an unusual, engaging platformer are here, but they’re surrounded by levels that are the opposite.
Levels are one- or two-screen affairs with platforms that disappear or don’t disappear. Some areas are locked off by levers, while others are speckled with enemies and spikes. Three collectibles must be found, in the form of racquet parts, before the exit opens. It all feels very familiar. There’s nothing here that you won’t have encountered a bazillion times in other platformers.
A Skied Opportunity
It rarely feels like the levels leverage the tennis abilities in any meaningful way. Sure, you can thwack the odd switch, but Pad Quad stops there. Where are the angled platforms or trampolines that let you bounce balls around corners? What about enemies that can be hit like balls, creating chain reactions? If you were to remove the tennis-playing, Pad Quad would be any other budget platformer. In fact, because Pad Quad has added bottom-bouncing as an alternate attack, you can play it entirely without any tennis moves.
The animal characters, seen on the Xbox Store card, are emblematic of Pad Quad’s problems. The identity of the main character changes every few levels, but we’re not sure why. You change into rhinos and sharks, which only serves to highlight ideas that could have been there, but aren’t. A rhino should play differently to a rabbit, charging about with additional strength, but there’s no difference. Again, it feels like an idea that didn’t make it past the quarter-finals.
Lacking Challenge
Most frustratingly of all, Pad Quad can’t muster a challenge. With a killer backhand, you’d hope to have some fiendish levels to master it. But Pad Quad never managed to offer a level that challenged us, let alone stopped us for a period. We’d say that the opening levels of any Crash Bandicoot or Donkey Kong Country are leagues more panicking than any level included here.
It all leaves Pad Quad as an opportunity that wasn’t seized. It’s a platformer where you can swing a racket, knocking back projectiles, and that’s inspired design. But Pad Quad does so little with the concept, building levels that could have been in any other budget platformer. Throw in a ludicrously easy level of challenge, and Pad Quad positions the player as a tennis pro while only offering amateurs to play against.
Important Links
Pad Quad Smashes Onto Xbox, PlayStation & PC With Padel-Inspired Arcade Mayhem – https://www.thexboxhub.com/pad-quad-smashes-onto-xbox-playstation-pc-with-padel-inspired-arcade-mayhem/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/Pad-Quad-Xbox-Series/9P3ZX8WD027P
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/pad-quad-xbox-one/9nkxzfw9lbbb
There’s a Windows PC version too – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/pad-quad-windows/9p844g5tfglr
