The first Biped sold five and a half million copies, which is great for Biped, but pretty lousy for me – a person whose job it is to know about games – because I’ve never heard of it.
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Biped Review: Puzzle Solving Fun For Two… With Robots!
Biped is a pleasure to experience and only suffers from a relatively short length.
The platform puzzle game, which launched on PS Plus last December, is averaging over 150k daily active users, according to Owlcat Games, and yet it’s been completely off my radar. Luckily I won’t make that mistake again, as I’ve already had some hands-on time with Biped 2 and, let me tell you: I can see why people love it.
Death Trap For Cuties
If you, like me, are uninformed about Biped, here’s the skinny: you and up to three friends play as adorable bipedal robots with a very peculiar form of movement. Your left and right legs are controlled by your left and right thumbsticks respectively, which might sound simple, but it’s anything but.
Try to imagine moving a character whose legs have one-to-one parity with the direction and angle of your thumbsticks. Just walking forward is hard enough, but the game quickly starts to throw Wipeout-style challenges at you that make even the sweatiest rounds of Fall Guys look like a walk in the park. If it wasn’t so cute and upbeat like they were Astro Bot’s much less nimble cousins, I’d think this game was some kind of sadistic torture experiment like QWOP. It’s fun though, I promise.
It didn’t take me long to get the hang of putting one foot in front of the other, but then Biped 2 ratchets up the challenge level very quickly. I’m not sure if it expects that you’ve already played the first game (and with 5.5 million copies sold, you probably have) but it felt like getting thrown into the deep end and learning how to swim one thumbstick flick at a time.
The puzzles and challenges I encountered in just the first 30 minutes were surprisingly thoughtful. I expected a lot of the challenge would revolve around walking narrow paths or outrunning danger, and while there’s plenty of that, there are also lots of puzzles that test your dexterity in interesting ways.
One of my favorite early game challenges requires you to cross a rotating platform filled with holes by spinning it left and right to find the path to the end like a cylindrical maze. You can try to rotate the platform by walking away from the center, but that puts you at risk of sliding off the side.
A better way to make minor adjustments to the platform is to plant one foot on the ground and extend the other straight out to the left or right, shifting your weight to one side or the other and causing the platform to turn slowly. As you line up your next move you can make little tweaks by moving your leg closer or further from the center. You don’t need to use this technique to cross the rolly bridge, but it’s one way the game rewards you for using your noggin.
Biped 2 Is Multiplayer Madness
If it sounds like all of this would be a lot harder with other players, well, you’d be right. While I didn’t get to experience any co-op gameplay myself, I got to see some video shenanigans and let me tell you, this one might be a friendship ender.
Some puzzles increase in difficulty significantly once you start adding more bipeds to the equation. One I struggled with a bit was a moving platform with disappearing tiles. If you stood in one place for more than a second you would fall into the water below, so while the platform carried you across the gap your job was to keep moving and avoid all the obstacles that appeared in front of you. Again, easier said than done.
There are no checkpoints in this puzzle, so even if you make it all the way to the end and accidentally fall off while trying to step off the platform (which may or may have not happened to me) you’ll have to start over from the beginning. Now try to imagine another player running all around and competing with you for safe tiles to stand on, and you’ve got a recipe for big laughs or big tears, depending on how much you like your friends.
I’m a huge fan of unique and experimental control schemes, so I’m excited (and nervous) to dig deeper into Biped 2 when it launches later this year. The sequel will have 32 new levels in both new and returning biomes, as well as level editor. I can’t wait to see what you Kaizo sickos can cook up for this one.
Biped 2
Action
Adventure
Platformer
- Developer(s)
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META Publishing, NEXT Studios
- Publisher(s)
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META Publishing