A game that kinda flew under the radar and I think something a lot of players would not know about (and actually purchase) were it not for the fact that it was part of the PS+ subscription when it was released. Metrico is a side scrolling puzzle platformer without any sort of narrative. You will be playing through puzzle after puzzle (around 60-ish). That may sound like a lot but each puzzle isn't that long. The ones that appear early on in the game can be breezed through in seconds and it's only when the difficulty increases towards the end will you be spending time through trial and error on how to solve it.
The graphics are minimalistic, as is the trend these days. One of the focuses of the game is mathematics, in the sense that there are a lot of straight lines and angles that evokes that subject. You can see protractor angles, pie charts and graphs and it looks and feels very promising as a unique experience. This somewhat drops off later on in the game where this theme blends into the background and never does more than presenting a theme. The art direction is great and I like the constant change from black and white line shapes to coloured blocks while still keeping coherent aesthetics. The puzzles themselves are clever but the game just thrust you into the deep end.
You learn the controls through images and sometimes it isn't clear on the extent of the controls. It can feel vague. The twist in the game play here is that your actions affect the environment. Jumping may cause platforms to rise; running forward may make the platform go backwards. This actually makes the puzzles much more interesting but can also be slightly annoying when you're trying to figure out the correct timing and steps towards solving the puzzle and continuing on your merry way. To be honest, I got bored by the game at around the third section. It didn't capture my attention and felt lacking in some way. The music is tranquil and calming, suiting the game's tone.
It shakes things up by introducing a new control input at the start of each chapter/section/world (whatever you want to call it). You eventually gain the ability to shoot projectiles, warp back to specific points and reset the whole puzzle. This makes it less stale but some of the control schemes are questionable. It tries too hard to use up the Vita's gimmicks and it gets to the point of intrusiveness. For example, you might have to tilt the Vita to move platforms towards you but it requires you to gradually tilt the Vita to 180 degrees while pushing the analogue stick to make your character run and also time your jumps to make it to the next platform. It can get awkward and stupid.
The other often criticized gimmick is the need to find specific colours to aim the camera to in order to move platforms. Sounds good and actually is fairly cool... if you've got the colours handy (you only need blue, green and red). It's not a problem if you have access to a computer and you can pull images up easily enough but if you're playing somewhere else (train, park etc) then it gets annoying and grating. Each puzzle is short, you can spend as little as 30 minutes to as much as minutes depending on your analytical problem solving skills. Some of the tougher ones can take a short while to understand. One annoying thing is that sometimes it's hard to tell what input influences what element and you end up trying to fluke it.
In particular regarding the motion control sections, it's hard to tell how much tilt you need (and tilting in which direction too) to move the platforms to where you want it to be. The later puzzles also takes precision, you will need to perform specific actions in the exact order and with the exact number of times in order to get past, which can be annoying when you have to repeatedly reset a level. There is no attempt at a narrative. You are simple playing this game for the enjoyment of puzzle solving. There's no true motivation to keep going, such as maybe discovering the answer to a mystery or the hero saving a princess. It's pure puzzle solving.
There are some noticeable technical issues with the game. It stutters... a lot. You will be travelling to the next puzzle and the frame rate drops so badly it feels jarring when it should have been a seamless transition. What's more, loading times from the puzzle select screen to the actual level feels way too long, to the point where you will press a few buttons to see whether it might have loaded already because you didn't expect it to take this long. Considering that neither the graphics nor the gameplay feels like something that would tax the Vita's hardware, it feels weird and was a big letdown. In the end, Metrico feels like an obscure game which while it wasn't a bad game, there isn't too much going for it to be recommended as a must-buy either (especially considering the high price and short campaign).
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