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Do Not Fall (PS3) Review

 
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At A Glance...
 

Formats: PS3
 
Genre:
 
Year:
 
Developer:
 
Final Score
7.0
7/ 10


User Rating
2 total ratings

 

We liked?


Frantic fun that requires near perfect timing and execution.

Not so much?


Does feel repetitious after long sessions.


Final Fiendish Findings?

Do Not Fall is a frantically fun platformer where hair trigger timing and perfect execution are a must. When entire levels fall to ground as you step on them, you need to think on your feet – and this is a game that will challenge you over and over again. While things can start to feel repetitive after a while, it’s great fun in smaller doses – and the local mutliplayer option mixes up with a new kind of play.

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Posted July 23, 2013 by

 
Full Fiendish Findings...
 
 

Don’t fall, huh? Seems simple enou…AAAAIIIEEE!

Do Not Fall personifies the idea of a game with a simple premise combined with oh so difficult execution. The idea is just what it sounds – don’t fall down – but that is not is easy as it first sounds. You play as a guy who looks to be the product of an illicit romance between a puppy and a bunny, and for some reason you are stuck inside a vending machine. Each “world” is a type of drink – from mineral water to green tea to shave ice. In each level, you must collect the components needed to create the drink.

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Simple enough, but the game throws quite a few different challenges in your way. You must go through a variety of doors, each of which needs a key collected in order to be opened. You have your standard obstacles, such as giant boxes or rolling spikey balls, which must be avoided lest they knock you off the platform. If this all seems familiar, it should – that’s all pretty standard platformer stuff. Run around a world, going back and forth to collect the things you need to advance. So what’s the hook in Do Not Fall? Falling floors.

Again, falling floors are pretty standard platformer stuff, but Do Not Fall takes it to the next level by building the levels almost entirely out of regenerating falling floors. Running through an area to get that key isn’t as easy when your return route disappears. The floors fall almost instantly, yet take a few seconds to come back – and it makes for some very frantic action. Each and every step must be perfectly timed like never before, if you wish to advance in the game.

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You can access checkpoints at times, which means if you do fall you won’t have to go back to the start of the level. But this is not a forgiving game – fall a few times and it restarting the level for you. Added to that, there’s a time limit, so any ideas of simply going through the levels slowly and cautiously aren’t going to be effective either. This is a game that requires split second timing – and often plenty of play throughs to get everything just right. It is fun, and often reminded me of my old Super Mario Bros. days, where playing a level twenty times to perfect the timing was not uncommon.

For all that, it does get a bit repetitious at times, particularly if you’re stuck on one difficult level. For this, the developers have added a pretty cool feature – by collecting items in the levels, you can buy your way past a level if you are just plain stuck. While it isn’t recommended real often (after all, most games are built on a progression of skills, and moving on without mastering them won’t get you very far), it is a great fix for those times where you keep getting so close but can’t quite make it.

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In addition to the single player mode, you can also play local multiplayer on Do Not Fall, and it is quite a different experience. Rather than just taking the same levels and adding two players to them, Do Not Fall offers a series of mini games that use the same mechanics from the single player portion, but in a different way. Each level has four characters playing, in any combination of human and computer. You can choose from things like soccer, where balls are located at one side of the field and the net at the other, and you must fetch the balls and make a goal without falling off, and without losing the ball.

Other multiplayer levels include a crown grab, where the player who holds the crown the longest wins, a claiming ground game where you must change floor tiles to your color, and more. Again, all of these sound pretty familiar, but when you add in the component of falling floors it really mixes things up. While in the single player mode, falling usually amounts to a timing mistake, in multiplayer mode, every other player is out to get you. Winning is often a combination of timing and knocking others off the board – and since these boards are really quite small, it makes things very challenging. My biggest complaint with Multiplayer mode is that it can be hard to locate your own character in the level, since you often only see the top of it.

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Do Not Fall is a frantically fun platformer where hair trigger timing and perfect execution are a must. When entire levels fall to ground as you step on them, you need to think on your feet – and  this is a game that will challenge you over and over again. While things can start to feel repetitive after a while, it’s great fun in smaller doses – and the local mutliplayer option mixes up with a new kind of play.


Amy

 
U.S. Senior Editor & Deputy EIC, @averyzoe on Twitter, mother of 5, gamer, reader, wife to @macanthony, and all-around bad-ass (no, not really)


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