Curved Space

There’s a strange disconnect amongst Curved Space‘s many parts.

Before starting up the game I decided to peruse the options menu as I tend to do, looking for subtitle settings and making sure the sound is turned up. I noticed the ability to look at the game’s soundtrack–stuffed with synthwave tracks (a favorite genre of mine)–and listen to it in its entirety. I attribute Hotline Miami‘s thrashing lawnmower of violence and action for getting me into the obviously 80s inspired music. It’s a hell of a way to get a person pumped for an action game. Obviously Curved Space would be the same right?

During one of the later campaign missions of Curved Space, I was repeating an objective I had done in nearly every previous mission before it. Maybe it was “Kill 3 Radiant Spiders” or “Drain the Energy Conduits” or “Survive!” I can’t really remember. At the same time a track from Scandroid or 3FORCE or Fury Weekend was playing, the music darting around in my ears to a furious, energetic beat. But I felt a little bored, like I was going through the motions. It was a strange, disappointing contrast.

Curved Space is marketed as a twin-stick shooter, along the likes of beloved games like Geometry Wars or Super Stardust HD. But one of the sticks moves you along its curved, gravity-defying maps while the other moves the camera around. Players need to hold down or press the R2 trigger to shoot a weapon and pointing their ship in a direction with the camera will indicate where the a beam or bullet will fire.

So Curved Space isn’t really a twin-stick shooter?

Curved Space is chaotic and built to be somewhat disorienting. Players pilot a small spaceship and move it around various three dimensional maps that all have curved surfaces. One map features an asteroid with a massive hole in its center with a piece of rock jutting up from the hole. Players can float around inside the hole or on top of the floating rock or simply move to the underside of the asteroid. Another map is an M.C. Escher-like loop that drunkenly curves in on itself. One map looks like a space station cosplaying as a donut, offering ramps to slide onto its underbelly.

Forewarning: if you are prone to motion sickness, consider adjusting the camera settings before hopping into gameplay. After a few seconds of playing Curved Space, I widened my field of view, uncomfortable with how close the camera was to the spaceship in comparison to how large the playable space felt. Only once or twice have I felt any kind of motion sickness in games and those times were in the middle of fast-paced VR sequences. Curved Space never made me feel nauseated but I know there are going to be many players who may have difficulty swinging the camera around to keep up with the most basic action; even more so when things heat up.

What’s meant to set Curved Space apart from the pack is this idea of the world being curved. Players’ projectiles will arc over the curves of levels, hitting enemies out of sight past the horizon. It’s possible to see a bullet traverse the curvature of the map right back to your ship. The same applies to player movement, along with the movement and bullets of the alien spiders players battle with.

Honestly, though, Curved Space‘s implementation of curves rarely goes beyond basic. Only a few maps have interesting uses of curves, such as the Escher loop. Otherwise, most maps are semi-large, sphere-like zones that have slight shifts in terrain. Enemies can swarm players from any side but that’s nothing unique in this genre. Having the ability to rotate the camera with the right stick means that an eye can be kept on the action most of the time. Curved Space often feels like a match of air hockey with dozens of projectiles flitting around the playable space.

Strangely, I think one way to alleviate this issue would have been removing the ability to have control of the camera. One of the joys of Super Stardust HD was not knowing what might be around the other side of the planet or moon players would be fighting on. Plus, there’s always a bit of delay in having to shift the camera in a direction and then pressing a trigger to shoot, rather than just pointing the stick in the direction players want to fire. The curvature of maps is a neat trick when the camera shifts on its head or a large enemy rounds the corner but Curved Space never advances the premise over time. There’s never any inaccessible parts of the map where players might need to make trick shots to kill a stationary obstacle out of view or navigational puzzles to break up the action.

Also deafening the joy of this “twist” are the dozens of weapons players encounter through the game. Ranging from useful, cool, or questionably pointless, players can equip up to two weapons in Curved Space. Some are infinite use while others have limited ammo. A large handful are bullets and energy blasts that spread for a distance and then dissipate. Others are hard-hitting single shots like the Sniper, Javelin, or Jackhammer. There’s stuff like the Sandblaster or Weedwhacker that are mainly for close quarters. Laser Whips and Scythes translate into weird sci-fi counterparts. And you’ll also find Rockets, Mini-Rockets, and Flamethrowers.

It may seem like an admirable bevy of weapons but many felt truly worthless in my various playthroughs of Curved Space. Why in the hell would I want to waste one of my weapon slots on the Weedwhacker, which acted like a buzzsaw that protruded about the distance of two spaceships in front of me? Keep in mind that because the right stick doesn’t dictate where a weapon fires, players would have to hold down the R2 button and rotate the camera to hit something behind them. The Sniper was a slow-firing single shot that did travel far distances but barely seemed worth the space. Some weapons would cause the ship to buck backwards when firing, which I didn’t entirely mind.

Still, a massive group of weapons shouldn’t be just “fine.” Would Curved Space have benefited with less weapons? Probably. Picking up weapons can also be somewhat awkward because they drop as pucks that glide around the map or can be destroyed if shot enough. Players need to hover next to the pickup before knowing what it is and then press circle to pick it up, not always the most seamless thing to do when trying to avoid a hail of spider bullets. After a couple of uses of each weapon, my reaction to seeing them went from “neat” to “meh” and I would often avoid picking up most things unless I was burdened with something worthless like the Shotgun or Sniper as my only options.

During gameplay, energy is collected to charge an Overdrive attack that ratchets up the damage of any weapon and prevents any ammunition from being used up for a short period of time. Or a full Overdrive charge can be converted into an extra life. Was it useful? I guess? But ultimately I forgot that I had a full Overdrive charge for long stretches of time. I probably missed out on several extra lives. Oh well.

A dash is also available that can deflect and reflect damage, proving to be one of the most useful tools in Curved Space. However, the dash only covers a short distance and has a very small recharge after one or two uses depending on a player’s upgrades. And let me just say, it can be abused pretty well. There were periods of time where I was surrounded by spiders and simply mashed the dash, preventing myself from taking damage for obscene amounts of time.

Coupled with the dash is a strange, often annoying mechanic called the energy lash. With the press of L1, the spaceship will eject an electrified tether that can be attached to enemies, draining them of energy and making them susceptible to more damage. Multiple enemies can be lashed together and the damage can be shared between all lashed targets. The lash is slow to fire and often wildly inaccurate but good lord is it effective. After feeling like the first boss encounter in Curved Space took a long time even with several uses of Overdrive, I tried lashing the next boss and dashing into it. Not only did I make myself temporarily invincible, I took a chunk of health off the boss. I began abusing this method throughout every subsequent part of Curved Space I played and never felt any resistance. Boss after boss could be lashed and dashed into. Enemies defeated in this manner are also more prone to dropping health or weapons.

It felt wrong. But it also felt like the most effective way to play the game.

The lash also began to act like a red flag for Curved Space‘s unappealing underbelly. The campaign not only serves as a tutorial but as an admirable attempt at telling a sci-fi story about parallel dimensions. Players will encounter other versions of themselves and choose who to side with. There’s a red, blue, and green version that apply to certain Mass Effect-like tendencies. A few branching paths add some replay, along with the opportunity to grab new upgrades after story thresholds and boss fights. Was I transfixed and on the edge of my seat? No, definitely not. But I still enjoyed the attempt made by developer Only By Midnight to infuse their arcade shooter with some personality.

Narrative aside, the campaign and any objectives in the other modes of Curved Space are terribly bland. And they repeat every single time. Players are asked to kill specific spiders, survive for a minute or less from a wave of spiders, kill only a radiant spider–a glowing spider that randomly spawns among other spiders that hunt down the player, kill another group of specific spiders, overload or charge energy cores, and kill a boss. Rinse and repeat.

First let’s address killing radiant spiders because it brings up an issue with the gameplay. When tasked with this objective it’s best to sit still and wait for the radiant spider to spawn. Moving around the map seems to prevent the spider from spawning or the player moves too fast for the spider to be visible. It’s a weird, tedious objective that rewards players with an instant Overdrive boost… except that it takes several seconds for any new enemies to load into the arena to be killed, meaning that it’s best to just sit around and wait for more enemies.

Curved Space has a strange issue with pacing. There’s never a true harmony between the amount of enemies on screen, the damage a player does, the amount of projectiles on screen, and the impact of anything. Sometimes the maps feel far too big for the amount of enemies that appear at one time, yet the maps aren’t big enough to use curvature in an interesting way. The DualSense vibrates and the adaptive triggers give a little resistance but not enough to feel special. I played the native PlayStation 5 version and after tearing through Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, fights in Curved Space felt terribly uneventful and spectacular, which is a damning sin in this genre.

Where are the fantastic explosions or the impact of a charged laser ripping through spiders? Despite being set in space, Curved Space shouldn’t feel this weightless and empty. Enemy density needs to be dialed up to account for the large spaces players can traverse while encountering little to no enemies. It would make the spiders feel more threatening because even on harder difficulties, it takes a lot of hits to lose a life.

Players also have to repeatedly deal with the objective where they are required to lash enemies to a stationary post to charge it. This takes forever. FOREVER. First, players need to be able to lash the post, then they need to be able to lash a spider to the post. It’s usually clumsy at best and I would frequently watch my lash slowly plod past a large spider. And because you need enemies to charge or overload the post, you can’t kill them, meaning players will likely open themselves up to further damage to speed up the process. There’s no word for it other than tedious and I was shocked to see this objective appear in non-campaign sections of the game. I loathed every moment objectives like this came up because they brought the action to a screeching halt.

So then, what’s left in Curved Space when all these parts are broken down? At its core, Curved Space is an arcade shooter with a heavy emphasis on leaderboard climbing. Outside of the repeatable campaign there’s Daily Runs, Arena challenges, a Survival mode, and an Endless mode. These modes are just more spiders, more objectives, adjustable modifiers, and potentially hours-long runs. The game has a few cool visuals tucked under its sleeve but could serve to be a lot trippier. Ultimately, it feels like an arcade shooter that will find a niche audience that will grow to become addicted to racking up high scores.

Nearly the whole time I played Curved Space I barely paid any mind to score chains and multipliers. When trying out a run in Survival I gave up after about twenty minutes because it stopped feeling exciting. Even with most of the difficulty sliders toggled on I didn’t feel challenged or in the midst of edge-of-my-seat action. And that’s not great.

Curved Space is missing that special “something” which sets other games apart from the pack. I can’t say that my time with it was never enjoyable. And while the game simply may have not lived up to my expectations, the few twists it attempts don’t go far enough. Few times do arenas take advantage of the literal curved spaces being fought in. Tedious and bland objectives interrupt the few moments of action where alien spiders bite and spit bullets at the player. That statement should feel as exciting to play as it is to say. Right now, Curved Space is a good game for those looking for an arcade shooter with leaderboard support that has a handful of new things to offer. If the action was dialed up and a few gameplay tweaks made it less exploitable, I may have wanted to stick around longer.