Since the use of 3D models and a 3D landscape in video games, gameplay mechanics for various game genres have been altered by this change. Most game genres like RPGs or Strategy games haven’t changed much with the use of 3D technology. However action games like Mario and Tomb Raider use 3D technology well. There is a dark chapter of history with games using 3D technology that should be familiar to anyone of the Tomb Raider games – and that would be the block puzzles. Remember pushing, pulling, and lifting those simple primitive models around that were the size of your avatar, so you could progress further in the game? Well now you can alter reality by swapping them to different locations in Swap!
Explaining the set-up for Swap seems harder to explain the mechanics of this first-person puzzle game. The game is set in the future where everyone is depressed over some unknown cataclysm that struck the Earth centuries ago. A group of people decide to put a random-boy into a duplicate dimensional world known as ‘new hope’, which is set a few centuries before the real world went crazy. There the random-boy with no name is meant to rewrite history and save humanity in this new dimension, which will hopefully merge back with the old dimension. The people then send this new dimension away from the dead Earth in hopes that it would come back to restore humanity and Earth. In this new dimension, the random-boy will be rapidly aged to become the chosen-boy, learn the SWAP technology so he can swap objects around, and hopefully save this new dimension so the old dimension could be saved.
Got all that? I hope so, because I’m not typing that out again.
Anyways the basics of Swap is shown well in the trailer above. You can swap objects that are on one color block to another color block via the SWAP technology. So a piston on a red-cube could be move to another red-cube. The game seems to have some basic physics thrown in for good measure, with no clue on the story I mentioned above up there. Seems good enough for me as I still don’t know what plot this game is going for.
Swap is available now on Desura, Gamersgate, and Indievania.
