You're a little ship thing and your girlfriend was kidnapped by a larger ship thing. Using no thrust whatsoever, the power of gravity and physics, you must travel the land through a variety of levels to rescue her.
Again, this is not a story driven game. Save for the very first" level" and the very last "level", there is no real story. Even so, it's told wordlessly, with nothing but rather expressive machines. This is a game you buy for the gameplay, not for the story.
Alright, the main attraction. What sets Nimbus apart is that you control a little ship-thing that has no source of upwards thrust. You merely change the heading, but the only ways to gather speed are through gravity, cannons or pounce pads. You can manage your speed by breaking, but can never accelerate. That certainly adds a lot of challenge to the levels.
The game is broken off in levels accessible through a world map reminiscent of Super Mario World, with hidden exits in several levels and branching paths allowing you to skip some levels if you so desire. Each level starts you off at a certain point. The racing element is simply the fact that you are timed and leaderboards show off the best times. There's a feature that lets you see the ghost of your best time, but that's as far as the racing goes. Still, i do admit it's fun to compare times with other friends who played the game. it's also fun to see where they gave up on this game.
See, the game starts off very nice, a bit slow, rather easy, but the difficulty ramps up quite dramatically as the game goes on, sometimes hitting nigh "i wanna be the guy" levels of absurdity with tunnels of spikes you must navigate through without slowing down too much the reach the exit. At some points, it becomes downright frustrating. Part of it is the fact that the controls become inverted when you're falling, part of it is how the bounce pads, used the most often as means of gaining momentum, work a bit too well, becoming a death sentence if not hit with the right angle in cramped spaces. Lastly, well, the overuse of spike blocks and spike tunnels really makes levels a lot harder than they need to be, especially since there are already a lot of ways to die if you simply hit a wall or have insufficient speed to make a maneuver.
As you can see from the pictures, the game looks pretty nice. it has a very rounded art style that looks even better in motion. The different objects all look very distinctive, there is never a moment where you're really unsure of where to go. it's all a very consistent style. It is a bit reminiscent of some 16-bit era games, such as Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario world, presentation-wise. You can also customize the way your ship looks and the way the trail you leave behind looks, each world has a different time of day and season for the background, which adds some variety. The music is, well, it's not particularly great, but it's atmospheric and it doesn't get in the way. As a whole, the presentation quite nice and certainly adds a lot of charm to this game. Then again it also hides the fact that this is a very difficult game overall.
Verdict
This is an interesting game that offers a challenging approach to 2d "spaceship" navigation/puzzle games (is that a genre? The only game i played that's similar to this is Bob is in Pieces), but is marred by the often frustrating difficulty. One of the things that would make it a bit better would have been the inclusion of a level editor, since it looks like they used rather simple tools to craft each level. All in all, this is a game that was hard, but somehow addictive, to t he point where the fun overcame the frustration for me. I give this game an interestingly fun rating with a frustratingly hard at times mention.
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