QCF: Fenix Rage

ust one more time. 

Just one more time. 

You've been there. You've played “that” kind of game. You've said these words. Death after death, stage after stage, hour after hour; going through these relentless motions is what can make a player love and hate a game all at once. Fenix Rage is the kind of game, a title that can addict you in ways that has you twitching in its absence—you know you can get through the level set. You can feel it. It calls your name when you're not there. When you play, you know that if you moved your guy like, right freaking there, you'd be home free.

Just one more time...

That's just how I felt as I played Fenix Rage, from Green Lava Games. I'll be the first to admit, I love ridiculous challenge in my action-platforming games. Heck, at PAX 2014, I was “that” guy, the one that jumped headlong into the most difficult stages in N++. So brutal difficulty is something of a stimulant to me, and Fenix Rage delivers. In much the same way Super Meat Boy operates, Fenix Rage depends on a very simple set of core controls and amps up the difficulty stage by stage, challenging players to navigate nigh-impossible gauntlets in a short a time as possible.

Oh, also, there's cookies. 

The goal of Fenix Rage is to catch a frosty dude that flew in on a cubic-like meteor and froze your town. It's simple; dash through each stage and try to catch him at a blue portal. Of course, you never can quite catch him, and it's on to the next stage. There's also a cookie in every stage. Some of these snackity baked goods are in some devilish places though, so only the most skilled will be able to snatch these guys up and make it out unscathed. Oh right, hit any obstacle and you're literally toast and sent back to the beginning of the stage (cookie-less) to start again.

Within no time, new elements and obstacles will spring up that adds new dynamics to the stages you're playing. Dashing through stone walls, lighting yourself on fire to get through pillars of ice, getting your timing just right to jump through like, eight enemies to snatch a chocolatey-chipped vessel of heavenly flavor out of the midst of them (again, cookies)... Fenix Rage knows how to keep you on your toes. There are even certain conditions by which super-retro stages can be opened up and replayed in the Fenix Box.

Now, how difficult this game will be for you all depends on your method of input. It's possible to play this game WASD style or with arrow keys and such but the best (and recommended) way to play is with a game pad, and an Xbox 360 pad gets the job done real nice, especially during the boss stages, which are stupid hard even with a traditional controller. Oh, but stupid hard in a good way. 

For a game like Fenix Rage, razor sharp control is a thing that's more or less required in order to keep people from destroying their tower/laptop with misguided rage/fists. Fenix Rage has that level of control, which is aided by the super-smooth rate that the game runs at. There's nothing worse than a cheap death at the hands of a crummy frame rate, or poorly defined elements. None of those here either. At a design level, Fenix Rage has that cutesy motif that would otherwise fool a player into thinking that it would be a cakewalk, which is totally wrong—this is a cookie-walk, which is so much more hardcore, as the aggressive, hard-edged metal soundtrack indicates.

With over 50 missions and all kinds of personality, Fenix Rage is just the game for those that need just enough aggravation in their lives, and is sure to have its players coming back. 

Just, one, more, time.