Metrico Review

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Reviewed on PlayStation Vita
→ August 5, 2014Metrico is a PlayStation Vita-exclusive puzzle game immersed in mathematics. Charts and graphs adorn its backgrounds; geometric shapes make up its platforms. And numbers? They’re everywhere. But don’t be daunted. Metrico isn’t a calculus class, and you won’t need your TI-89 in order to work your way through complex equations. Numbers simply provide the fuel that makes Metrico run.
Unfortunately, for as novel a game as Metrico is, and as outrageously promising as it seemed, the final product doesn’t quite meet expectations. This is a truly unique and inspired experience, but it’s also a technically flawed one, and when Metrico started to stray away from typical controls and towards the PlayStation Vita’s motion, camera, and touch functionality, the experience quickly diminished in quality.
What I truly love about Metrico is its lack of literal messaging. You’ll find and hear nary a word through its 60-plus puzzles spread across six unique worlds, leaving everything up to your own interpretation. Its side-scrolling puzzle solving seems typical, yet it’s anything but, and it’s easy to get caught up in the ambience of the world and what it might be trying (or not trying) to tell you. I read into Metrico something heady and meaningful; you may see it an entirely different way. I think that’s part of its beauty.
Adding to its unique atmosphere is its tranquil soundtrack and subtle noises. When you start Metrico, it uses a graphical cue to push you towards wearing headphones instead of listening to it over the Vita’s tiny speakers or, worse yet, playing it on mute, and it’s good advice. Its masterful audio accompaniment makes Metrico, in turn, a more stimulating visual experience.
While the graphics are simple, yet beautiful, and the sound is perfectly fitting, Metrico doesn’t run that well. Its framerate stutters noticeably, especially in between puzzles that are supposed to segue seamlessly, and its load times are borderline absurd, especially for a game of this size. It’s not technically ambitious, so there’s no excuse for what might be, pound for pound, the absolute worst load times I can recall on the Vita (it consistently takes over 30 seconds to load a puzzle from the puzzle select screen, for instance). Additionally, Metrico glitched out on me multiple times, forcing me to restart puzzles. I fell through environments, some puzzle elements wouldn’t turn on, and I’d die inexplicably. These problems aren’t around every corner, but in playing almost the entire campaign in one sitting, I did encounter them several times.

Truly cerebral.

When things work, however, solving Metrico’s puzzles is, at first, straight forward. The entire campaign hinges on your actions, and how they affect the world around you. So you may see a barrier in your way with “0/4” next to it, and another barrier beyond it with “0%” by its side. Through trial and error, you may realize that every time you jump, that “0/4” becomes “1/4” and then “2/4” until it gets out of your way. Meanwhile, that “0%” may go to “100%” by walking backwards. The interplay between these elements is truly a breath of fresh air.
Deeper into the campaign, however, Metrico gets too crazy for its own good by throwing in way too many elements that take advantage of Vita’s functionality, but don’t take into account that you might be playing in public, without means to solve certain puzzles. For instance, it uses the Vita’s back-facing camera, starting off by asking you to capture light to solve puzzles. Then it demands a certain color light – red, blue, and green – to solve even more puzzles. It’s a nice idea, but it’s incredibly impractical, and reeks of short-sighted design. I had to sit on a couch with a ripped piece of green paper next to me, constantly pointing the camera at the paper, the red rug underneath me, and a blue piece of furniture nearby. What if I was on the train? On a plane? In a car? Playing in bed, in the dark? What would I do then? I could have sworn we learned these lessons with another promising game held back by gimmicks in the form of Sony Bend’s otherwise excellent Uncharted: Golden Abyss.
Metrico also falls prey to poor touch control, something not all that uncommon on the Vita. You’ll eventually be given the power to shoot projectiles in order to solve puzzles, but aiming requires the use of finicky back touch controls that frustrated me often. Its puzzles are so clever; Metrico doesn’t need all of these extra bells and whistles to shine. The fact that they’re included actively walks everything back from greatness.

Technical issues and gimmicky controls injure Metrico's beauty.

With so many ways to interact with an otherwise straight-forward puzzler, more complicated puzzles with lots of elements quickly became exercises in figuring out what to do to the Vita to make everything click. I’d shake the Vita to figure out if it was motion-based, I’d get up and put the Vita in front of a light to see if the camera had anything to do with it, and I’d tap the touch screen for good measure. It all became exhausting after a while. I wanted to immerse myself in Metrico, because its aesthetics and message beg you to do so, but some of its more gimmicky controls are, unfortunately, totally unimmersive.
Fortunately, I can’t deny that solving all of Metrico’s puzzles – which took me an afternoon, for the most part – gave me a sense of pride and accomplishment. Some of the puzzles are very complicated and require you to look at things in a totally different way, especially as you get deeper and deeper into it. And I also love the so-called “choice” you have at the end of the six worlds, where you’re given two doors to go through with no explanation whatsoever, with nothing but a graph showing you the decisions other players in the world made (The Walking Dead: The Game-style). Its Trophy roster – full of all hidden Trophies – is also enticing, especially because I only earned a couple of them the entire time I played. I’m intrigued by what kind of crazy things you have to do to earn them all.



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