Developer: inbetweengames
Rrp: £8.11 (Itch.io) and £8.49 (Steam)
Have you ever played a game that has a great idea or mechanic but just seems to flop in the execution? Well, that has been my experience with All Walls Must Fall.
This game is an isometric tactical shooter (for the most part) with a twist. You’re a time traveller and can rewind the battlefield to make the situation more advantageous for you, that is as long as you have the resource to do so.
The amount of ‘time resource’ available is limited in each level and literally everything you do uses some of it, the more intense the activity the more gets consumed. As I said there is time resource to be found within the level, it gets generated by exploring rooms and completing combat. Of course, combat itself uses the resource so that requires you to be a bit thoughtful in your actions.
It’s this time travel mechanic that makes this game so interesting. If you decide you’ve made a tactical blunder you can rewind to your hearts content, or at least until you run out of resource. Once you finish the combat you get to watch a video of what you did but in real time and from the perspective of someone who isn’t seeing all your rewinds.
The levels are all procedurally generated (with exception of the first level that acts as a tutorial) so in theory each level feels unique.
Note how I said ‘in theory’ in that last paragraph, this is where a major flaw in the game is. Every single level is set in a nightclub all of which look incredibly similar to each other. Couple that with the fact that there are only five enemy types, of which all but one are a variant of ‘man with a gun’ and this game starts to get very boring very quickly.
This really is a case of a great mechanic being squandered within a dull setting. Honestly, if the game had some variation in the levels and enemies I think this game would have made more of an impact.
