Velocity 2X is a space shooter/platformer where you move through a space drama by running and shooting in a few environments, alternating between the two different gameplays. You mainly do this to complete four objectives per level - beat the level quickly enough, get enough crystals/survivors and get a high enough score, all of this feeds into an XP system that ultimately just allows you access to more levels. I first tried playing this on a keyboard and really couldn’t, but even with a controller this game suffers from the ‘rub your belly and pat your head at once’ syndrome, there’s just so much to do that it’s quite difficult to do everything correctly and it quickly becomes frustrating. I tried to give it a chance, but at some point the game introduced one mechanic too many, and I stopped.
After messing around the menu a little - including some weird time spent with a calculator-like app - I started the game with keyboard controls and immediately had to bring my controller to bear because I found it too tough to play it with the default keyboard mappings, worse yet is that I couldn’t change them for some reason. The game started you in platformer mode where you ran, dashed around and tele-dashed through obstacles. The game later introduced two different gun options, one that fires in 360 degrees and the other that only shoots in a straight line. At some point I gained a throwable teleportation device as well. All these things didn’t mix well for me, you can’t use certain weapons while you’re dashing, I often just hit the wrong buttons and couldn’t do simple things and had to restart the levels. I wish the platforming mode had fewer mechanics.
The shooting mode doesn’t fare much better. You can shoot and teleport, drop portals and warp back to them, you get bombs that you can fire in four directions, and there’s a button to greatly speed up the stage’s speed, getting all of these coordinated never felt great, at some point I just stopped using the default gun and went with the bombs all the time. Most levels have you destroy switches in the correct order and at some point being able to drop checkpoints and come back to them was fairly interesting at least, but the act of zipping around the map never felt super great, especially in all the stop-and-go alternating of going at full speed then stopping to carefully maneuver around puzzles.
I didn’t have a terrible time with Velocity 2X but there was just too much unneeded complexity thrown in there for no reason I could figure. I stopped playing around the time where I got the throwable teleportation devices for the platforming section and ran out of them. Since I was in another section of the level when I noticed this, I would’ve needed to backtrack and recover the ones I had thrown before, I think. I really didn’t want to do this.
