Circulate Review - PC

3

Gameplay: 3
Graphics: 4
Audio: 2
Innovation: 6

Circulate is an arcade style game where you deal with different kinds of balls, trying to get them from point A to point B. Taking into account temperature, angles, gravity, magnets, and even UFO’s, it’s up to you to rotate your way through 120 levels in this rather unique game. It’s the first title from Slave Circus games, an ambitious entrance to the arcade gaming market, but unfortunately it lacks what successful arcade games have – fun.

Gameplay

Circulate is about as tedious as they come. The game kicks off with a tutorial which helps you get used to rotating the screen around, however as it turns out, the whole game feels like one big tutorial. As we grinded our way through the monotonous 120 levels here at Sliced Gaming, we realised that there really wasn’t any incentive to keep playing. Every few levels, a new element would be introduced, and then you have to use the new ball or magnet, electricity, etc. with other elements already added. This continues on right through the entire title. We expected the levels to get more complex, but they really don’t. The final levels are basically the same as levels in the 30s and 40s.

When you complete each level, you’re awarded with a star rating, with five being the most stars you can get. This does give you a small reason to play the levels again, but if anything, you're probably more likely to choose to play one of the more enjoyable levels over a bad one that you only got one or two stars in, and that’s if you can be bothered actually playing through levels you’ve already beaten.

The game mainly consists of rotating the whole level around using the right mouse button to get the balls to go to where you want, but often you have to use the left mouse button on certain objects, to open and close doors or to lock balls in a hole so you don’t have to worry about them. The game doesn’t get much more complex than this. Ice balls doesn’t mix with Fire balls, nothing mixes with black holes (except for UFOs because you’re trying to get rid of them), and you can’t put the blue ball in the red hole. Duh.

Circulate tries to be complex, but really it’s lacking the creativity to make the game a memorable experience. Perhaps if there was more to a level than just rotation and making different objects reach different parts of the circle, the game might be worth playing. Until this idea is used in a manner that makes it more complex and interesting, such as multiple circles to balance or even 3D, Circulate will remain a very simple and unchallenging game.

Graphics

Circulate is an arcade game, and therefore its graphics are simple. That being said, they still provide you with everything that you could want in a game of this nature. With very nice looking backgrounds, and a lag-free frame rate, Circulate boasts the ability to switch to ...