One of my favourite board games growing up as a child was The A-Maze-ing Labyrinth. It was a simple idea where players would push pieces of the labyrinth back and forth each turn, changing the layout of the board and moving the goalposts for winning about. If you take the principle of moving and flipping the board and apply it to an endless runner style video game – that is similar to what FlipTiles: Warp Lines offers.
At the beginning of the game you have access to one type of environment with retro computer styled lines that act as paths weaving around the screen like spaghetti. You play as a ship tracing one of those lines but as each line will spin around or meet its end at the edge of the screen, you need to indirectly alter the course of your ship to keep yourself in play. The game progressively removes the playing field from the left hand side of the screen so you don’t want to get caught up in a dead end or facing the wrong way for too long or its game over. This is where the tile flipping mechanics come into play.
Across the bottom of the screen are different tile flipping mechanics – each with a cool down that stops you spamming them. Some flip vertically, some horizontally and most are a diagonal slice and flip. The way how the levels are designed means that there is rarely a simple flip and resume going forward choice. instead you are reacting to the best of a selection of bad choices and meandering your way towards your goal as best as possible. In the main mode, you can speed up the cooldowns by using all of your move set available and not focusing on the easier moves to make. If you only use a couple of moves, the cooldowns get longer and longer and in time you’ll just get stuck. I much preferred the jeopardy of Panic Mode. In Panic Mode, your cooldowns never do return back to a shorter timeframe and that forces you to really consider every choice you make as a move becomes expensive.
The further you get into a level, the more obstacles are placed in your way. These include other ships to bump into and turn you around or laser beams that sap your health. You can trigger attacks and abilities back to clear them and these too come with cooldowns. You’ll also unlock different ships with different abilities too so some have immediate radial attacks whereas others target only one enemy with a missile for example. Clearing a certain distance then unlocks more levels too and each level type has its own unique approach to geometric spaghetti pathing. Some work better than others and being brutally honest, some are visually easier to understand than others. One level looks like a Windows 95 pipe screensaver that actually hurt my eyes when playing. FlipTiles: Warp Lines isn’t a looker and one of my recommendations for improvement is to tidy up the menus and user interface as things don’t always line up, it looks garish and the game drops you in with little context. It makes a poor first impression but the actual gameplay is better than the initial impression given.
FlipTiles: Warp Lines is a niche title but it belongs to the corner of a abstract, unusual puzzle community that enjoys oddball experiences. It won’t win any aesthetic or UI awards but there is a good challenge here that becomes moreish because it always flags your personal best score or the next player on the leaderboard to beat. Intriguing, if not entirely successful.
Review copy provided by developer. FlipTiles: Warp Lines is out on Steam.
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