Review: Professor Heinz Wolff’s Gravity (Nintendo Wii)
Physics-based gameplay has come a long way since The Incredible Machine debuted fifteen-odd years ago. Gravity is one in a long line of recent mind-benders that take the basic idea of going to point A to point B and staples on today’s physics-calculating trimmings to provide a modern take on the old-timey single-screen puzzlers. This idea of real-time calculation eschews the rigidity of previous similar games in the genre, providing many solutions to one single puzzle, and opening up even more if the player is clever enough to manipulate the engine’s limitation to his/her liking.
A relative unknown to both North American and Asian audiences, Professor Heinz Wolff is possibly best known on both coasts for the recently-revived The Great Egg Race on BBC. The game, a European import plucked by publisher Deep Silver for US consumption, does little to introduce the good Professor to the player, so until I got around to doing some research, I just assumed that Heinz Wolff was some zany mascot created for the game, in the same vein as Gyromite’s venerable Professor.
Gravity’s puzzler format is simple enough: you drag and drop the game’s set pieces around a 2-dimensional level, hoping to get a small ball to roll and smack into a switch to progress to the next stage. Achieving that goal requires a myriad of solutions from building a bridge with your set pieces, to building a complex set of simple machines to send the ball flying to the goal.
The game features over 100 puzzles, which seems like a lot, but the reality is that the game doesn’t really get progressively harder — some puzzles can be figured out in less than a minute, and some could take you days to wrap your head around everything — and the more difficult puzzles are sprinkled around your progressive path rather randomly. Your mileage may vary of course, as I admittedly whizzed through a few levels by exploiting the physics system a bit — on some levels you don’t even need to use all of the provided pieces if you know what you’re doing. Still, I felt bad after cheating or lucking out through some of the levels; nothing beats the puerile, inexplicable joy one gets after successfully tackling a puzzle that’s kept you glued for hours.
The game’s point-based hint system allows the player to see the developer-mandated solutions to each puzzle. By solving puzzles, you earn points that can be spent to place one of your puzzle pieces at the right place, and each hint costs progressively more points to unlock. That’s fine but I prefer the old-fashioned method of getting the family together and trying to solve each puzzle using each member’s crackpot theories and watching everything fall apart, or rarely, come to fruition. The controls and interface I felt were accessible enough for everyone to figure out, and this sort of familial experience is quite rare in today’s videogames.
Even the audiovisuals are inoffensive to a fault, playing along the game’s latent accessibility. The music ranges from muted and understated, to grandiose and annoying tracks that accompany each stage’s format, forming a selection that surprisingly isn’t that bad. And the visuals, albeit filled with prerendered annoyances and overall a bit obnoxious, hold up well during the game, although the framerate dips quite hard when there’s too much stuff going on the screen. I liked all the different, hand-drawn backgrounds that graced each puzzle myself. All-in-all, as I’ve mentioned, both aspects of the game are unremarkable; a good trait to have for puzzle games in the end.
Judged by the sum of its parts, Professor Heinz Wolff’s Gravity is well-executed. There’s just a couple of issues that hold this game down — for instance the game’s “sandbox” mode could have been much, much more than a physics tinker-toy; a create-your-own-puzzle mode would have been great. And being a disc-based game kind of puts the game’s value into question: there are only 100 puzzles, and a couple of mini-games thrown in that add a bit of replay value to the game, but once you’re done with everything, you’re done. The point I’m getting at is, Gravity would have been much more well-received as a WiiWare title; but as it stands, I thought it was an excellent little puzzle game that just lacks a little extra something.
The Verdict
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Professor Heinz Wolff’s Gravity Screenshot Gallery:
Obscure game.
I think I’ll pass. lol