Defy Gravity is a game where you use a special gun to shoot two types of weird glowing mists: gravity wells, and anti-gravity wells. You use a combination of these two, along with a jetpack and a shield that makes you immune to both wells, to get to the exit of each level.

I have to say that this game let me down somewhat; while I did enjoy it, I didn't find it nearly as charming as perhaps the player or site reviews had lead me to believe. The idea is delightful, I just don't think it was implemented as well as it could have been.

My biggest complaint is that the levels didn't seem clever or very well thought out; it was often sticking you in a room with a bunch of orbs that you can bounce on and expecting you to finagle them into a path to the exit. Other levels are just a ton of orbs on the screen that you have to dodge. It's "challenging" in the sense that it takes delicate placement of portals, of movements, but it's just boring and unengaging.

There were smaller problems that exacerbated the boredom-inducing puzzles. The game would do a very slow fade in when spawning so I would constantly find myself dying before I even started because I was holding right (cause I was bored of the puzzle and ready to be done with it) but couldn't see what was happening and would thus die by walking off the ledge. Also, anyone who has played a game like Super Meat Boy knows that the puzzles behaving with the exact same timing is crucial when you die a lot because it allows you to slowly fine tune your efforts. I swear that I would spawn in Defy Gravity with obstacles and platforms having a different timing.

This spawning problem, to me, also indicates how much thought was put into the puzzles. With Super Meat Boy, the puzzles are perfectly sculpted that you can dash through them with everything lining up perfectly to be have a smooth flow from start to finish, if you are good enough. Defy Gravity just felt like they thought up puzzles that had some challenge just due to randomness rather than design, threw you in, and thought "Well they'll get it eventually". They tote it as a "action platformer/puzzle platformer" but it seemed to me to be too puzzle oriented to not have a fine degree of precision on level design.

Beyond that, I didn't really feel like I had super great control over my character, even up to the end of the story mode. I wholeheartedly admit that this is not a flaw in the controls but rather a consequence of using gravity as the core mechanic. I would say I used anti-grav wells 90% of the time because I found them more consistent than their counterpart and I used them in a very specific way: under me to essentially give me another jump. This took away a lot of the creativity of what the game was mainly about. The actual gravity wells were just too unpredictable: if you're falling really for any length of time longer than the blink of an eye, you're going to be traveling too fast for a gravity well to stop you and if you use it in other situations, it may decide to fling you on past it to your death. And again, a part of this was getting used to the mechanic of working with gravity and its exponential nature, but that's why I say I think the implementation was kind of lacking: it may be a difficult behavior to get used to, but the game is only 90 minutes long.

There were other problems that are less crucial: the graphics look like they were made by a beginner to Flash, e.g. the gravity gun looks like a Super Soaker. The title screen is literally white text on black background with absolutely no artistic flare at all. And I understand that this game seems to be very low budget and I can excuse these things, but then there's stuff like the absolute complete lack of closure at the end of the game. The credits are shown in a small level in boxes in the background that are effected by your wells, which is pretty cool. But when you get to the end door, it just throws you into another level and says "this is hard mode". Even a "Thanks for playing!" screen would have been enough to make me feel like I was actually done.

There were positives to the game. Like I said, the idea is decently original and while not implemented perfectly, has a decent amount of merit with novelty. The soundtrack is pretty catchy and the sound effects aren't bad. While I thought the graphics were a bit rough, they were at least consistent and didn't look bad. The length of the main story was just about perfect, at least in terms of not seeming to drag on too long. And I liked that, for a low budge game, the title screen and credits were just like playable levels; that was cute. So despite the ratio of criticism to praise in this review, I did enjoy this game. There's just not a lot to be said for the enjoyable aspects because it was pretty straightforward.

Defy Gravity was disappointing in that I was expecting to walk in to a great game and instead just got a good one. It has flaws but is still enjoyable if you like this type of genre. Also it's like $3 (or like a quarter on sale) on Steam, which you really can't go wrong with.