Petite Adventure [Xbox]

13 Mar

Petite Adventure says it all in the name - it’s a pretty petite title, with each level being able to be completed in as little as 30 seconds. You’re required to complete a variety of objectives in little toy cars - driving around various locations ranging from a kid’s bedroom to a pool table and a garden, with tasks such as “Drift in the circles” or “Burst the balloons” given for you to complete. Some of the vehicles handle a tad easier than others, but none of them offer a particularly smooth ride.

Trying to complete the objectives required in each level are sometimes not as simple and straightforward as they seem, with spiked flails swinging around at the back of your car on the levels where you need to pop balloons (not quite as easy to control as you’d expect), or laser beams that seem to fire off intermittently when you need to destroy cones under a time limit, which is super frustrating.

Visually, it’s nice enough; it’s got a sort of cartoony, cel-shaded look to it, and there’s a few different environments available to keep things interesting. You’ve got a few vehicles available - though you don’t choose these, you’re just assigned a particular one for each level - and these change the gameplay up ever so slightly, with some cars being faster and less clunky than others. The soundtrack is quite generic, with rocky-arcade tunes that are nothing to write home about, though they’re not awful either.

Now, as much as we love Ratalaika, seeing them listed as publisher quite often conjures up an image of what to expect with the titles. They support many indie developers, with a fairly large percentage of these falling into the same ‘achievement collecting’ area, where the games don’t have a whole lot of value over and above the quick gamerscore - and that’s pretty much exactly what we have here.

The store listing also has a display image that is kiiiinda misleading, as it really looks like you’d be getting a racing styled game here - so you’d be forgiven for feeling annoyed about this. Priced at £4.99 on the Xbox Store, it’s quite a low priced title, but given that you’ll probably be done with it in 30 minutes or less, you might be best to wait for a sale if you’re not totally sold on what it has to offer.