PlayStation Vita has only been on the market for a few months and doesn’t yet have a robust catalog of games. But when you examine the great titles that are already out there, from Super Stardust Delta to Uncharted: Golden Abyss, another game quickly joins the conversation: Escape Plan.
Fun Bits Interactive delivered a quirky, enjoyable but slightly flawed puzzler with Escape Plan, and the small team there still toils over its flagship Vita product to this very day. Patch 1.01, which launched some time ago, fixed some common complaints about the game, from the finicky nature of the “gesture” system to some more subtle balancing issues. Free DLC was also delivered, giving gamers some more puzzles to mess around with.
Now, Fun Bits and Sony are prepared to launch new epilogue DLC in the form of The Asylum. 18 brand-new stages complement a variety of new additions, including seven fresh Efficiency Challenges and unlockable costumes for Lil and Laarg. A new patch – version 1.02 – is also on the horizon, which makes additional fixes to the core game, previous DLC and the experience of playing Escape Plan at large (no pun intended). The DLC and the patch go live on the same day.
The Asylum DLC adds new enemy types called Shock Minions that prove to be a different sort of enemy than Escape Plan fans may be accustomed to. The padded walls of the Asylum muffle the back touch pad used to distract enemies, meaning that you often have to put Lil and Laarg in danger to coerce them into positions where obstacles around you can lay the killing blow. Shock Minions’ innate electrical abilities can also be used to charge special items in the environment.
Though the DLC levels start out slow and easy, things will crescendo significantly, and the Shock Minions will continue to be a part of the puzzles as they get more and more difficult. All of this is in addition to the typical Minions you dealt with in your campaign against Bakuki, so prepare for some tough enemies to both avoid and slay in equally tough puzzles.
What’s most notable to me, however, is that when I sat down with Fun Bits Interactive’s CEO Chris Millar to talk about the new Escape Plan DLC, I was refreshed by his approach not only to crafting DLC, but to patching his game. Fun Bits keeps a careful eye on metrics that are sent to them when you’re playing the game with your Vita connected to the PlayStation Network. If they see spikes in, say, deaths on a certain puzzle or an unreal amount of gestures being used on another, they go in and tweak things until those spikes disappear. None of this takes away from what makes Lil and Laarg’s adventure so special. It just makes their adventure better.
That’s worth noting because when Fun Bits Interactive learns lessons like these, it evolves its collective philosophy which shows through in its Asylum DLC. And though The Asylum is being announced for the first time right here, right now, it’s very close on the horizon. On Tuesday, June 12th, you’ll be able to download the game at a steep discount off of the PlayStation Network. Following that, the DLC pack will be adjusted to its regular price of $4.99.
Source : ign[dot]com
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