Your rocket lands with a crash in a strange place. It looks like it might've been a city many centuries ago, but now the land is strewn with radioactive hazards and dangerous traps. Your goal is to activate the beacons and clean up the radioactivity, but what will be come of your work? That's the big question in Final Charge, a basic but challenging platformer by Kebabs.
Once you exit the spaceship, you can move around using the [left] and [right] arrow keys and [Z] to jump, double-jump while in mid-air, and jump off of walls you're clinging to. All of these skills will be quite helpful while you dodge many things that can kill you, such as pools of radioactive slime, electrified walls, piercing drill bits, searing laser beams, auto-turrets, cannons, mechanical bugs, and no less than four varieties of electrocution. If you can make it past all that, you can hit the purple beacons to turn them blue and make the world a slightly better place. (And if you need a reminder of what the world looks like, you can use [M] to open up your map, but you have to activate at least one beacon in the sector to reveal the map.)
Final Charge is a straight-forward platformer where you've got all your skills upfront. There's no messing about with power-ups or upgrades or weapons, just jump around and try not to die. But while its design is very simple, the gameplay is still very challenging. The cleverly-designed maze of a world is sure to keep even seasoned platformer veterans searching for the path to a missed beacon somewhere two floors above you. Can you rid all sixteen sectors of radioactivity? Grab your final charge and find out.
A couple of helpful tips.
You can double jump. Simply press jump again in the air. If you are falling without having jumped, you only get ONE midair jump, so make it count.
You can slide down walls, and wall-jump. You can double-jump off of walls as well.
Beacons are checkpoints. Entering a new area counts as a checkpoint. If you are destroyed, you will respawn where you came in, or at the last beacon you touched in that area. You can touch an activated beacon and use it as a checkpoint.
The final area is 1-4. This can only be reached from area 2-4. There is a boss there. You can go here whenever you like, even before activating the other beacons.
This has to do with the boss' behavior, as well as how to beat it. Don't continue if you want to figure it out for yourself.
To begin the fight, step on the button next to the robot with the dorky look on his square face. Yeah, the big one that's just hovering there over the last beacon.
If you get close to the beacon, the boss will rush back to it and hover there to keep you from touching it. So you're gonna have to start running to get anywhere.
The boss WILL chase you. You have no means of destroying it. You must touch the last beacon to win.
Your best bet is to slow him down. Any time the boss touches a hazard that would blow you to smithereens, it slows him down.
This next one is the method for beating the boss.
In order to make it to the beacon, you're going to have to go all the way around the room. Step on the button, then start running and jump all the way up to the platforms. Be careful of the lasers. Once your on the other side, slide down the walls so you can see the Tesla Spheres on the other side. There's a forest of them, so be careful. When the boss gets close, he'll get caught in the spheres and slow down. Get to the beacon!
Once you've gotten that beacon, the boss will just hover above it all sad-like. You can then push the button again and open the doors on the other side of the room, which lead to section 1-3.
My biggest challenge with this game has to do with the controls.
The wall-jump mechanic is TOO sticky, making it very difficult to navigate some of the puzzles because I'm either stuck to the wall and moving too slow, or jumping off the wall when I'd rather just jump up.
Probably too late to change, but there it is.
Agreed that the wall-stick is a touch too sticky, but after getting the hang of it all, it was a lot of fun.
The difficulty on this one ramps up to "Are you kidding me?" levels pretty quickly. (Or maybe, I chose a route I should have postponed till later.)
But the graphics are adorably Nitrome-esque, the save points frequent enough, and the gameplay tough but fair. I did not find the wall-jumping mechanism as "sticky" as some of the others, but I am playing on an ancient Mac and have come to accept lag as part of my life.
I really enjoyed this game. I agree that the wall jump was rather sticky, especially considering all the places you want to just drop down. It was challenging but fair, with enough openeness and choice in where you go to make it interesting, yet having a clear enough map that navigating isn't a problem.
Great game; difficulty was high (and there were places that you could not reasonably reconnoiter without just throwing yourself into the breach) but the restarts were quick (no waiting for a screen wipe or similar).
I agree that coming off a wall slide was a bit too difficult; there aren't that many places that it mattered, but there were certainly some where you had to learn to anticipate the delay in coming off the wall.
The ability to teleport between activated beacons would have been nice - having to snake your way back through super fussy platforming that you've already solved got a little annoying at times.
I agree with eamurdock. I haven't gone through all the sectors but am trapped between 1-4 and 2-4. I'm not sure I can get back through 2-4 and I'm having no success with 1-4, even after having read the Spoiler above.
Let me port to a beacon so that I can enjoy the rest of the design.
Ok, finally finished. All 12 sectors cleared, albeit with a lot of back and forth platforming. While the final boss seemed impossible after visiting only eight sectors, by taking the time to clear all twelve (and the platforming practice and wall clinging exercise that took) it wasn't that difficult after all.
Being able to port to different beacons actually would have taken something away from the game. I wanted to go through the last tunnel from Sector 1-4 to 1-3 but couldn't do it since the boss was beaten. Loading the game at that point just re-runs the credits. Oh well, good game.
Correction: It wasn't that the boss was beaten, it was that I had touched all the beacons.
I thought enough of the game to run through it again and left a couple of beacons untouched when I did the boss. He just hovered, like Wolfgang said, and I was able to go and get the last beacons. When all the beacons have been touched, THAT'S when the credits run.
I truly enjoyed this game. I especially liked how even if you died, the traps/doors/enemies didn't reset to a new course. The graphics were great, and the controls were smooth. I agree with the wall-jump being inconvenient in some situations. Overall, the hour and a half spent on this game was well worth it.
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