Lifted

When you play Rayman, do you find yourself wishing it was more like Uncharted? What about time travel? Do you want to see more direct references to Back to the Future in your platform games? If any of this piqued your interest, then let me introduce you to Lifted, a brand-new action game starring a high school student and his professor as they stumble their way through space and time in order to hunt down long-lost treasure. Yeah, that’s heavy! But is this time-traveler an excellent adventure or a bogus journey? That’s what we’re about to find out when I review Lifted by Adventure Works.

All Ari wanted was a little extra credit. That’s how he got roped into helping his science teacher with his latest experiment, a time-travelling elevator. This sends the two, along with the professor’s pet chinchilla, on a tomb-raiding adventure through time in order to track down a priceless, magical tiara. Of course, none of this goes as planned, sending the trio on a journey that they’re never going to forget.

Taking control of Ari, we run, jump, swing and roll through a wide assortment of caves, castles and creepy swamps. This is a non-violent game, so Ari and the professor never have to battle bad guys or beat up bosses. Their go-to strategy is to sneak in using a grappling hook and wall-climbing, and then run away whenever anything gets too dangerous. The action is presented in 2.5D, so while parts of the game may look 3D, this really is just a side-scroller at heart.

No matter if you’re in Egypt, Mexico or Tortuga, Ari is going to have to figure out how to get through a bunch of simple mazes. Some of this involves platforming and using the grappling hook to get around, while other sections will have the player solving a bunch of brain-teasing puzzles. Don’t worry, the puzzles in this game aren’t too challenging, with most revolving around pushing a bunch of boxes and crates around. With its colorful graphics and non-violent adventuring, Lifted often feels like it’s aimed at younger kids, and I can’t imagine any of them having a hard time figuring out how to solve these admittedly easy puzzles.

Although the platforming is simple and we’ve seen all these puzzles before, this is a cute and humorous game with a brisk pace that keeps us bouncing from one location to the next. The limbless characters are adorable and the back-and-forth banter is supposed to be fun, though we’ll get into why that’s a problem in a moment. For a younger audience, this is a fun and enjoyable game with larger-than-life characters, exciting scenarios and a lot of screentime devoted to the doc’s surprisingly vocal chinchilla. There’s a lot to like here.

That said, as an older gamer who has seen all of this before, I found myself frustrated with Lifted. One of the big knocks against the game is that the developer is far more interested in telling a story than letting us play the game. There are times when a minute of platforming will be sandwiched between two lengthy cinema scenes. It can sometimes feel like there’s a story beat every few steps, which is the kind of thing that can really break up the overall pacing.

Now, it is worth saying that the problem isn’t that the characters are chatty; Nathan Drake never shuts up when he’s on an adventure, no matter how high the stakes are. The issue I have is that Ari is insufferable from start to finish. It’s bad enough that the voice actor is trying his hardest to sound like Marty McFly, but the fact that the character clearly doesn’t want to be there only makes the experience worse. This would be fine early on, but no matter how many cool locations or periods in time, he won’t shut up about hating every second of the trip. It’s like going on vacation with somebody who can’t wait to go home. It’s often wrapped in a veil of comedy, but it’s still needlessly negative and annoying. I kept thinking about how much more fun I would be having if the character was as excited to be hopping through time as I was. Based on the dialog, Air feels more like a hostage than a hero.

Speaking of comedy, Lifted has this one joke where Ari has to climb, swing and slide through dangerous, trap-filled mazes, all while the professor always seems to find an easy way to end up at the same destination. It’s funny that they acknowledge this gaming cliché the first time, and I could see them repeating it a second and third time, as comedy comes in threes. Unfortunately, this game subscribes to the theory that a good joke gets better the more you repeat it. Even when it’s multiple times in the same stage. They make the same joke with the same punchline right up to the very end, long after it stopped being funny. Couple that with the constant negativity coming from Ari and I found yearning for peace and quiet.

It doesn’t help that the gameplay is a little floaty and imprecise. This isn’t a big problem when you’re running and jumping through the normal bits, but there are times when you’ll need to land on a tiny log or platform, requiring pinpoint accuracy. Sadly, the 2.5D action is not set up for this level of precision, something that is only made worse by sluggish jumping and rolling; moves that always felt like they were slightly delayed. All of this ultimately results in a lot of cheap and unnecessary deaths.

When it comes right down to it, Lifted is a game that looks good and has a fun set-up, but is ultimately too preoccupied in telling its story and complaining about time travel. The adventure will last you around four hours, but if you skip all of the needless cinemas, you’re really only getting an hour or two of actual gameplay. That’s a shame, because the levels and puzzles have a lot of potential. Had they focused more on the platforming action, Lifted could have been a genuinely great game, no matter your age group. As it is, this game will likely only appeal to young children.