Can a game be too easy? It’s not too dissimilar to the ‘can a game be too hard?’ question, we think. In principle, there’s an audience for most things, and an easy game will be craved by young players, less able players, or players who just want to chill. And like the most hardcore games in the world, it’s about whether the level of challenge is worth it. Is it rewarding, is the game lovely to look at, is the challenge appropriate?
It’s the question we had rattling around our heads throughout our time with ReactorX 2. It’s a journey that started with ‘oh, this is a pretty long tutorial’, then went on to ‘are they just making it for achievement snufflepigs?’ to ‘wait, aren’t there only a few levels left?’ and finally ‘bloody hell, they really didn’t step up the challenge at all, did they?’.
It says a lot, we think, that all we could think about was the game’s relation to difficulty. It pulled us out of the game for all of its twenty minutes, as we think the fault is shared between us and ReactorX 2.
ReactorX 2 is, unsurprisingly, a sequel to ReactorX, a game we didn’t personally play but – checking the reviews – had a pretty similar reaction from its players. The devs know what they’re doing and what works, it seems. ReactorX 2 has you playing The Technician, a robot sent out by a spaceship’s captain to fix whatever’s causing them to stop dead in the middle of space.
So, you hop into thirty rooms where batteries have been moved from couplings, and panels have been destroyed. By fixing these two things, a room can power back up and – Bob’s your uncle’s robot – you can get the ship moving again.
Moving a battery is simple as pie. They are boxes that can be both pushed and pulled (no Sokoban-like concerns about getting a box wedged in a corner), and you are repositioning them on a network of power couplings with the aim of juicing them all. The one nobble here is that the battery has a pattern on its top: if it has a crossroad shape on the top, then the battery will power everything in the four cardinal directions; if the pattern is a corner-piece that points north and east, say, then it will only power up couplings in those directions.
It’s a mixture of box-pushing and light puzzles, then: two of the classics of video game puzzling. You are nudging a pink crossroad battery into the pink space that will light up the most pink couplings, and then tucking others around it to finish the light-show off.
A little more interest gets smudged in with the introduction of lasers. These will zap you back to the entrance door if you try to limbo under them, as they’re intended for powering up batteries. They juice up batteries with a very specific colour, so you can swap to the colour you need or fill up an empty battery.
We thought the lasers would be the key to difficulty. Knowing which box should be which colour could have been a mind-fuddler. We close our eyes and imagine some multi-coloured couplings and a slew of uncoloured batteries, with the challenge being which block needs to be which colour. But it never quite goes there.
Because ReactorX 2’s solutions are glaringly obvious at all times. Corner batteries need to go in corners. Crossroad batteries should probably go somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t get cheeky and throw in layouts that subvert that rule. It doesn’t pull the traditional light-puzzle trick of blending colours – a blue and a yellow to make green – to make everything more fiendish, as the battery’s power stops when it reaches a coupling of a different colour. There are countless ways that ReactorX 2 could have teased the difficulty up, but it’s just not interested.
‘Fixing’ panels could have been another source of challenge. Pressing Y while standing on something broken causes it to get fixed with your magical wrench. Now, if you had limited uses of the wrench, and the destroyed elements were blocking your lights, well, it could have gotten strategic. But ReactorX 2 isn’t interested in those kinds of shenanigans.
Is it a problem? Yeah, we think so. As we mentioned, difficulty was all we could think about, so there’s that. But we feel there has to be a payoff: if you’re going through the motions, as ReactorX 2 is, then the least it can do is offer some variation, some story perhaps, or something nice to look at. But ReactorX 2 can’t muster it.
The game works fine, with controls doing everything they should, and no bugs to scupper anything. But we just can’t find value in it. As a test, we put it in front of our seven-year old, who immediately bounced off the hard sci-fi setting, but found it all too easy too. So what is it doing? Who is it for? We genuinely couldn’t tell you.
It is giving 1000 Gamerscore in less than a minute, so there is that we suppose. The cynical might wonder if it’s the main reason that ReactorX 2 exists. We hope not. And we wouldn’t go quite as far as concluding that, simply because it doesn’t look scrapped together in a week, and the box-pushing feels well oiled.
ReactorX 2 feels like an experiment. We expected a wall to slide down in our lounge, revealing some scientists with clipboards. It’s a game completely devoid of challenge, to the point that you are wondering if it’s the gaming equivalent of a trick question. So, you’re playing it with suspicion, wondering when the rug is going to be pulled. It feels like a social experiment to see what players might do in that situation.
Games are glorious things, because there’s an audience for pretty much everything. But we honestly don’t know if there is one for ReactorX 2. It’s so stupendously and wilfully challenge-less, that we can’t see the wood for the ease. And we’re not sure anyone wants something that doesn’t make you think once.
You can buy ReactorX 2 from the Xbox Store
