Linebound

           Linebound is a fast paced, simple input game for Android. You travel along a single line that weaves around in front of you. There are only two buttons to control your character, a simple white dot. Those controls are the left and right of the screen. Push left and the dot moves slightly off off the line left, and right vice versa. Linebound shares many qualities with Super Hexagon, a game I love dearly, and Pivvot, which I have just recently discovered. These games all have some very important things in common:

1) Very Simple controls

2) A great soundtrack

           These two things make a game like this. And Linebound has both.

           As I’ve said, there are only two buttons to control your character. But Linebound does more with these. As you move around and the line you follow spins and twists, the way you think each button makes the dot move changes. When you are going the opposite direction from which you started, everything seems backwards. I absolutely love how Linebound takes  two simple buttons and makes it confusing.

           And Linebound certainly doesn’t suffer on my second point. The soundtrack is great. Very simplistic but immersive. And that’s why the soundtrack matters. To immerse you into the game. And as I talk about immersion, it reminds me of one thing that I don’t like. Super Hexagon doesn’t have a pause button. And I know you are probably thinking, “It’s not super Hexagon, stop comparing it to it.” But I think that the lack of a pause button makes the immersion complete. Not being able to stop means you have to ignore everything going on around you. That is complete immersion. Another thing that I didn’t like was that there is no timer or counter telling you how far you have left until you finish your “stage.” I think that, again, this ruins the immersion. There are lots of other minor things that I noticed but I don’t have a huge problem with.

           Now this brings me to my final point. And that is a problem with the developer. After playing Linebound for a while, I emailed them some of the points mentioned above and how to improve Linebound. Their response was, to me, completely understandable, but still very unsatisfying. That was that they were “done” with Linebound. They did not want to keep developing it. I understand this, and it would make complete sense, had Linebound not been as good. Linebound was, according to it’s dev, a first time project to get them going. That’s all fine and well. But that means that Linebound isn’t going to get the attention that, I think, it deserves. And for that reason Linebound will never be better than good. Don’t get me wrong, I love it and would recommend it to anyone, but it doesn’t have the polish that it should, the polish it deserves.

Dev Info:

Twitter: @nicolaigd

Game: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nicolaigd.linebound

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