Damaged in Transit

Damaged in Transit is a puzzle game where you play as a construction worker who uses robots to get supplies to drop points. In the game the robots move on their own, and you make arrows move to make them go where you need them, but all the arrows move the same direction. Oh there are also no walls, so if you have an arrow pointing towards a place where there’s not a block to stop the bot, or another arrow, it’ll go right off the map which means you’re going to have to restart the level.

Through the levels the difficulty curves pretty harshly. For a while you just have to move the bots around the level, which are just straight paths, and both bots are right next to each other on the same path, so it’s just turning the arrows to make them turn to keep following the paths. Later on though, they move the two bots to different areas and you have to control the arrows to get them both to the drop off point without sending either one of them off the track. There are also some points where you have to pick up keys to unlock blocks which drop so you can drive over them. Then they add spikes, which will obviously destroy the robots. Some of the spikes just stay up, others pop up when you roll over them, and the last type is one that pops up or down each time you turn an arrow. So it gets hard pretty quickly, and the curve just suddenly skyrockets as you need pinpoint quickness to flip the arrows immediately after one touches so the next one which touches a different arrow has it changed in that split second between both touching. It… isn’t fun at that point, and it just gets too fucking hard.

There’s a boss battle at the end of each of the five worlds where you need to run the bots to hit different parts of the boss to defeat it while dodging attacks, usually by making the attack change directions each time you turn the arrow. After beating it, I think you need to get to the end of the level as well, even after beating the boss, but I can’t be sure anymore. Each world has twenty-five levels, the last one being being a boss battle, that means the game has one hundred and twenty-five levels. I couldn’t get to level thirty because it was so fucking hard. The level I got stuck on, I believe, requires that super precise arrow movement thing where one robot touches and it needs to be switched instantly before the other one touches it and I just can’t do things fast enough. It also doesn’t help that the bots are on opposite sides of the screen making it hard to keep track of them.

In the end, I really thought I’d like the game, this is my kind of game by the look of it. However, the timing requirements even when you’re playing on easy at sixty percent normal speed. That kind of ruined the game for me, it’s just too fucking hard. Hopefully after the game has been out a bit longer, some walkthroughts will come out, and maybe I’ll end up enjoying the game more at that point. But, sadly, even though I really wanted to enjoy this game, I didn’t. It sucks, but it happens.

 

Damaged in Transit was developed by Wyatt Yeong, Diego Garcia, Greg Heffernan.

Point of Sale: Steam, Switch, itch.io.

$15

 

A review copy of the game was provided by the artist/animator, Diego Garcia.

darkmikasonfire does not award Damaged in Transit the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval.