A Virus Named Tom Review

With a title like A Virus Named Tom, you’d be right to wonder just what kind of game you’re getting yourself into here – but don’t fret. Apart from being perfectly safe to install, A Virus Named Tom presents plenty of entertaining and silly backstory to keep things interesting. Moreover, its clever take on puzzle gameplay is likely something you’ve never encountered; a bizarre, yet compelling hybrid of Pac-Man and a sort of rotational connect-the-dots exercise.

Confused? Okay, here’s how it works: you play as the titular virus set loose in the engineering database of a large corporation with the mission of infecting their devices and causing them to malfunction. You do this not because you’re evil, but because the mad scientist who invented you is seeking revenge after being recently fired for his increasingly insane inventions. Your goal is to connect a series of interlocking pieces to one or more hubs by rotating them to form an unbroken chain. At first this is ludicrously easy, and you’re essentially only battling the clock to get a higher score or finish before time runs out and you lose. But things get increasingly difficult as the corporation discovers you and implements a series of more and more stubborn challenges to impede your quest.

Eventually, these challenges will come in the form of active subroutines (that manifest themselves as spider-like creatures), which patrol a region of the map you’re playing on and kill you by touching you. As you go on, the spiders get tougher, faster, and smarter, becoming increasingly problematic. You'll also constantly encounter different defensive subroutines: encryption, for example, that makes it impossible to see the shapes of pieces until you connect them to a hub, or self-contained virus that must be destroyed using timed "glitch bombs" in order to complete a map. Indeed, the learning curve in A Virus Named Tom ramps up rather quickly, and by the final levels, casual players will be tearing their hair out in frustration. Still, you’ll come to learn that, while A Virus Named Tom does allow you to complete maps in a variety of ways, it also clearly wants you to see the gimmick or “perfect route” through a map in the minimum number of moves, like a puzzle game would. This double challenge helps add replay value to a game that would otherwise be a one-and-done affair.

If the gameplay proves to be too much of a challenge, though, A Virus Named Tom allows you to rope in up to three buddies, locally, to co-op through the story with you. The game really comes into its own here, as the challenge level feels like Goldilocks’ proverbial porridge tasted: just right. Friends can divide labor: one can distract/destroy the spiders while the other rotates and reveals pieces, for example. Or, they can divide maps into segments and handle a local area themselves – something the game will often force them to do, anyway, with force fields. Either way, communication, timing, and most of all, a solid plan will serve you well. It's disappointing, of course, that you can't find partners to play with online, but in a game that requires intricate co-operation and co-ordination, it might be better to avoid random jokers from the internet, anyway.

Regardless, co-op in A Virus Named Tom is a blast, but if you get tired of making nice, you can always play the game’s versus battle. Essentially this game mode is a combination of Bomberman and the Chinese board game Go, with the objective being to draw a border around territory, lock it down, and blow up your opponents using “glitch bombs.” The only way to unlock locked territory is to hit someone with a glitch bomb (which expands outward along grid lines when it explodes), so a lot of versus mode become about trying to force people into fairly obvious traps without much in the way of tricks up your sleeve. As a result, the versus mode, completely lacking the puzzle element of the campaign, isn’t nearly as much fun as co-op or single-player.

Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com