Fig. 8

3 Dodge those schema!
Fig. 8 is one of those games that chooses style over substance, and while it looks good on paper (or, rather, as good on paper as it does on the screen), it’s not a truly compelling experience when you get down to it. You control a 2d bicycle tasked with pedaling through a blueprint landscape that scrolls independently of your movement, and thus falling off the screen is bad, hitting lines is bad because it makes you crash, and going in as straight a line as possible is good, as you get a score combo the longer you go in a relatively straight line – there’s even a “slow steering” button to help you keep that score multiplier going.

Now, the whole precision steering angle is a little more interesting than I make it out to be. Given the tree infested – or possibly rock infested, or angry blob infested – chunk of suburbia you have to pedal through, finding a decent path is a challenge. It’s extremely difficult to get through anything more than about the first four minutes without crashing, and it’s the good kind of hard. Not the achingly addictive, glorious, “I can’t do it but I have to or I’m going to be thinking about it all day” kind of hard, but good nonetheless.

The thing is that while the score multiplier system is interesting, and the game has – as mentioned before – a good amount of style points going for it, the repetitive nature of the game gets old fairly quickly. I tired of it within 15 minutes, but as always, your mileage may vary. One friend I showed it to was still playing an hour later, and the last I’ve heard, he’s still going at it during lunch breaks.

A solidly average 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 for my review score. Not a bad browser game by far. Now if we could only get that graphical style in, say, a top-down TF2 demake… hmmm…