by: Michael Barnes

Sideway: New York is yet another downloadable retro platformer that’s long on charm and style but short on innovation or original ideas. This time, the differentiators are a hip hop/graffiti culture theme and a Super Paper Mario-like concept where two dimensional characters inhabit a three dimensional space. The visuals are initially striking and the level design makes the most of the idea of shifting its planar orientation including some rather clever puzzles, but ultimately the hip cartoon artwork loses its ability to obfuscate the boring, been-there done-that gameplay.

Nox is a soul-patched graffiti artist that gets sucked into a tag by his rival, Spray. In the 2D world, Nox is like a graffiti tag himself, and many of the enemies and structures in the game are reflective of this art style and game concept. It turns out that Spray has kidnapped Nox’s girlfriend, Cassie, and Nox has to traverse Spray’s wall-bound world and battle his henchmen to rescue her. And thus the running and jumping are set into motion. Nox has a veritable catalog of special abilities available, all of which seem to reference earlier games in the genre. He’s got Strider’s slide, Bionic Commando’s grapple, Mario’s ground pound, and the usual assortment of melee attacks, double jumps, and so forth.

Unfortunately, what Nox does not have is the kind of precision controls that more often than not separate great platformers from the also-rans. Jumping is floaty, animations are choppy, and I don’t know who thought that a melee attack that also pushes the character forward was a good idea. Simple bosses that require hackneyed strategies (make a charging enemy run into wall, reflect an enemy’s shots) wind up being more difficult than they should be, and many deaths result from spur-of-the-moment confusion over the clutter of abilities and the sluggish, inaccurate jumping.

The level design is mostly good so the clunky navigation of them isn’t entirely unpleasant. The 2D/3D effect imparts a unique look as Nox rounds the corner of a wall and the camera adjusts to his new surface. Some areas require Nox to push blocks around or work out ways to shift the plane to reach inaccessible, obscured, or otherwise blocked areas. There are plenty of hidden areas, and collecting score tokens offers an incentive to explore and replay the levels that are keyed to areas of New York City- Jamaica, Chinatown, and Times Square in particular.