Red & Blue

Outland was an XBLA game that I picked up a while back and have been slowly making my way through. I finished it not long ago and thought I'd mention it on here since it was really good and as far as I can tell, hasn't gotten a ton of press. It has a really cool visual style and the sound design fits in really nicely with it. In fact, when I started thinking about the game to decide what I'd write, the "starting a new section of a level" sound played in my head. You hear that a lot. This game also got my wife's approval as far as sound goes. She said it was "soothing" and didn't mind being in the room while I played.

Basically it's a side scrolling platformer (the controls are really tight) where a huge part of the game is based on switching your character from red to blue and back again. When you're blue, blue bullets don't hurt you, likewise with red. And you have to be the opposite color of enemies in order to do any damage to them. The difficulty scales really well, starting at super easy and getting to be pretty tricky towards the end. It's not uncommon to be toggling colors in mid air to get through some bullets and kill an enemy of the opposite color. Fun stuff.

My only minor complaint are a couple of the boss battles. They can be fairly long and you have to memorize lots of patterns. So you end up fighting them multiple times in a row. Well, I did anyway. If you have a PS3 or Xbox, you probably ought to at least check out the demo. I think it's something like $10 or $15.