Review: Sideway New York
By Miodrag Kovačević | November 17, 2011 | Reviews | 1 comment | Share
After seeing its PSN release, Sideway New York finds its way onto the PC. It’s quite the interesting concept: you’re a mobile graffiti, who moves through various surfaces in a 2D plane, with the catch being that the surfaces belong to real-world objects. So, you’ll move from one wall to the next, from wall to roof, to billboard and so on.
This idea is obviously the center of attention, meaning that the game’s aesthetics allow it to be quite presentable. Even the most adamant of platformer haters would let out at least a “neat” after seeing the game in motion. However, the visuals also require a certain approach to solving problems. While walls know which way up and down are, floors don’t, so what determines the gravity of each such surface is the entry point. This often leads to having to scout your surroundings and search for hidden routes if you wish to be able to reach hidden pick-ups and power-ups. This kind of approach is initially entertaining, but soon wears thin as the level design starts repeating itself. Sure, it adds slightly new elements like Donkey Kong Country-styled cannons, but it never leaves the impression of the player exploring something new.
This is the extent to which the main gimmick of Sideway affects actual gameplay. At its core, Sideway is somewhere between your typical platformer and a sort of beat ‘em up. For most part, it’s the 
former with elements of the latter. And it shows. While the platforming sections are, for most part, well thought-out, the combat is quite unreliable. Your character has a few ways at approaching violence. Punching, throwing grenades, ramming into foes, slamming into foes, kicking… Each attack yields a different result and many enemies require a specific attack. The problem arrives when you encounter enemies with no foreknowledge as to what type of attack they require. This often leads to mashing various attacks until something works. The hilarity of this is that sometimes, an attack like the dive kick will kill an enemy outright, while during your next attempt fighting that same enemy, it won’t work. You’ll either bounce off your adversary or take damage due to contact. In general, every encounter with a stronger enemy would either result in a short, smooth bout, or your death sentence. Thankfully, combat is optional and if you’re skilled enough, you can just avoid the bad guys and be on your merry way.
The music itself is both good and bad. The good stems from the actual quality of the tracks on their own, but when combined with the game, it doesn’t work out quite so fell. It’s not a matter of it not fitting the visuals. Quite the contrary, the rap tracks present work well hand in hand with the presentation. The 
problem is that they aren’t compatible with games. There is a reason vocal tracks aren’t as prevalent in games. Having such songs on loop can get irritating. Hearing them once or twice, maybe, but when levels are so long that you hear a certain song at least three times, it gets mind-numbing. The fact that there are different tracks per level with several seconds of silence between them doesn’t help. I am sorry to say that I managed to end up hating the tracks I initially quite liked by the time I had completed the game. There was one vocal track in particular which was introduced late into the game that had some weird deliberate echoes. Each time I heard it, I was close to just exiting the game for good. Thankfully, if you have something you think would be more fitting with such a game, you are able to turn the default music off.
From technical side of things, I experienced some strange slow-downs at times and I have read a few more complaints about bad optimization, but I could easily attribute that to my own PC. What is an obvious 
oversight is the gamepad support. While the game does state on the official store page that it has controller support, it boils down to only allowing you to use the official Xbox gamepad, so if you’re unlucky enough to have a Logitech pad like some people, you’ll either have to hunt down third-party software and emulate the Xbox pad, or just play on the keyboard. Thankfully, I had no issues whatsoever playing on the keyboard. There’s no pixel platforming and the actual movement of your character is rigid enough (not in a negative way) to allow for proper input on the keyboard.
I suppose I should address the story as well, but really, it’s just an excuse plot with highly unengaging characters. But, in all honesty, I didn’t care for the story in other platformers, so I’m not neither going to hold it against Sideway. Another thing worth noting is that it supports local co-op, but I didn’t have the chance, nor means to test it.
All of this combined resulted in quite the unengaging and boring experience.
All in all, is Sideway New York worth your time? It took me 5 hours to get through the game, without getting 100% completion and it costs 9€ fully priced. I will admit, I loved the visual presentation and I loved the idea of this kind of approach to 2.5D platforming. However, I just did not have fun playing it. It’s just that some design decisions don’t really work. To elaborate: it makes sense on paper that a game with 2D characters drawn on 3D surfaces would be about graffiti or have something to do with drawing. If you’re going with graffiti, it makes sense to go with hip-hop as your soundtrack. This, in turn, would also lead to an urban setting. However, all of this combined resulted in quite the unengaging and boring experience. The design decisions make sense, the logic behind them is obvious, but the execution is sub-par. Sideway’s visual gimmick is actually enough to build a game upon and some sections are a testament to that, but beyond that, it seems like one bad choice after another.
Score: 4.5/10 | Read our Scoring Policy |
WTF