Refunct Review

In a nutshell, Refunct is a fairly simplistic 3D first person platforming exploration game. You are instantly thrown in at the shallow end, which is where I felt I stayed for the entirety of the game. The game starts by raising you out of the water with no explanation as to where you are or why you are here. There is no character introduction, no character development and no story. This is a game that wants you to work things out for yourself. The simplicity of this game is part of its charm. It’s all gameplay, no filler.

The premise of this game is that you are to explore the world around you traversing from platform to platform. As you walk around, the large platform tiles will change to flat green grass. Turning all tiles to grass is one of your objectives resulting in an achievement at the end of the game. The second objective is to collect all the red floating cubes that are on certain platforms. Your primary objective is to look up at the sky to find a glowing beam of light. This beam leads down to a button on a platform which will unlock more platforms to explore.

Controls for this game are typical to a normal FPS game without any shooting element. In essence, running, walking and jumping are your main controls, but this is all you need and they work very well and feel intuitive.

For the most part, the game plays like this. Walk on all the tiles around you > walk on all the tiles and climb to get to other tiles to also make them green grass > find red cubes along the way and eventually press the button to reveal more tiles to repeat the whole process again until the game is complete.

The enjoyment of this game is in its interesting level design and exploration. You can’t die, but this helps in being able to try again to reach areas that you have yet to get to. Water surrounds each area which you can swim in, this serves no purpose but to help you get around to other areas or to catch you when you fall.

A couple of achievements are tied to speed running, including completing the game in under 4 minutes. This only includes the main objective of pressing all the buttons, but a smooth run of this is entirely possible for most competent FPS players.

I won’t spoil the ending of this game, but it comes quite quickly even on your first play through. Even playing slowly this would probably take you a maximum of 45mins unless you get stuck on a puzzle. But this is very rare and unlikely. It would have been nice to see some more challenging puzzles.

This game is comparable to Mirrors Edge and Dying Light, but purely on the free running parqkore front and how you can pull yourself up to ledges that are slightly too high to jump to.

The audio for this game is seamless. After a few minutes it drifts into the background as it should and immerses you into the game.

There are little to no loading times in this game, which is understandable knowing the small size of the game itself and the lack of content to load. It would be very surprising and irritating if this game had any loading times while in the game itself.

To summarise, Refunct is a perfectly enjoyable half an hour of first person exploration. But be very aware that’s all it is when considering this for purchase. Once you have done everything outlined in this review, there is no need for replay at all, unless you feel you want to relive the experience. Watching any gameplay videos of this game will almost certainly spoil some of this game for you. Considering this game takes under 4 minutes to speed run, you can understand how this isn’t hard at all to spoil. On the plus side, it’s an easy 1000 gamerscore for any achievement hunters out there.

Bonus Stage Rating - Average 5/10

REVIEW CODE: A FREE Microsoft Xbox One code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.

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