The Life of an Ex-Hardcore Gamer

This week’s review is not going to be a typical review because Physics Lab is not a typical “game.”  Physics Lab is basically a sandbox program that allows you to create objects and play around with the physics engine.  If this interests you, read on.  If you just want to be able to play a game with clear objectives, a beginning and end, etc, then look elsewhere.

When browsing through the Indie Games new releases as I do most days I stumbled across Physics Lab and I thought it sounded like a cool idea.  Lucky for me the nice guys over at 2.0 Studios actually sent me an e-mail a couple days later saying they liked my site and wanted me to check out their game.  They were nice enough to send me a free copy and I played around with it for a couple weeks to get a grasp on this overwhelming program.  While overwhelming may seem like a bad thing at first, it just means that after you get passed the learning curve you have quite a powerful program to work with.  You can create various objects through the use of shapes, springs, and pins and make them interact in various ways based on physics.  You can make stars that you just want to throw around, boxes you want to knock over, or even make machines like a car that drive around and shoots down other stacks of boxes.  Just mess around and have fun with it is the name of the game, but it is not a game creator and therefore you’re basically just making “scenes.”

As soon as you start he the game/program/app/whatever you’re greeted to some nice physics with the logo and options on springs bouncing around with balls falling down.  You can pick New, Load, Credits, Controls, Tutorials, 2.0 Codebox (click here for info on that), and Other Games (ads for the other games from 2.0 Studios).  All these options are self-explanatory and just lead you to various sections.  The tutorial section is just a series of videos.  They are not interactive which would have helped me a lot more than just a video since I learn by doing, but there is still a wealth of information there.  There are quite a few of them to watch and are broken down into just over a minute for most of them so it’s not information overload each time, but sometimes they do go through some of the stuff quite quickly (especially since you are just watching a video and not doing it so you have to remember all that stuff by the time you load up the game proper).  On a side note some videos just end on a static shot, some fade to black, one even faded to black yet kept running for another 15 or so seconds.  I do not recommend trying to use this program at all before watching the videos and reading the controls for it.

Onto the controls themselves, they complex but you can do so much with them.  You can zoom in/out, setup a grid, draw objects, copy/paste, delete, move, add more objects, and modify various specs of the object like mass, gravity, etc.  There is a ton that this program can do and they did a great job trying to map things to a controller and not a keyboard like most other programs of this nature.  Once you get the hang of it you will be able to work rather quickly at making the objects and modifying things as you see fit.  Once done making your creations you can save them for later use, but there is a limit of only 10 slots.  I understood limitations like that back on consoles with memory cards but it did not make much sense to me when you can have a hard drive to store many more creations.  With the wide variety of things you can make in the game, you would think you would want to be able to store as many as possible to show off to friends.  Maybe (hopefully) this is something that can be fixed in an update. [UPDATE 2/4: I just got an e-mail stating that they will be upping the amount to 50 in a patch] I also had the game crash a couple times, but for the amount of time I played it was very minor.

This is a great set of tools for those that just want to play around with some physics and create some cool scenes, but it is not for everyone.  I had fun playing around with it for this review and I will definitely be playing with it some more and maybe having some like-minded friends over to work together and create some things so had I not got the game for free I would have gladly paid the 240 MS points ($3) that they are asking for it.  If anything, you’re helping contribute to the studio that can hopefully make more games using the wonderful physics engine that they have created.  No rating for this review since it’s not really a game and its usefulness is based on how much you like to just play around.  Click here to go to the official Xbox.com listing and add it to your download queue.