Hands-on Impressions: ‘[tesseract]’

Tesseract is currently a game on the App Store in its Alpha stage that should be getting a lot more attention than it has.

is currently a game on the App Store in its Alpha stage that should be getting a lot more attention than it has. Not being ashamed by its influence on other widely popular games, [tesseract] flaunts it in the tagline: “Create like Minecraft, Play like Portal on your iPad”. I was intrigued by the statement and decided to give it a try. It feels a lot like Portal without the gun, but with a Minecraft -like editor in terms of blocks. While playing I was surprised at how console-like it truly was and immediately became confused as to why more people aren’t talking about it.

First of all, the game is gorgeous, one of the best looking 3D games on iOS to date. Currently you can enter “Konstructs” (levels you’ve downloaded or created), visit “Konstruction” to create level challenges or tell stories within the levels, take a trip to the Tesseract Network where you can search and download levels created by other users, or go into the settings menu where you can reset maps, change the volume of the music, and load up different profiles. While some of these features aren’t fully developed yet, it’s a pretty loaded alpha overall.

Currently only Konstruction and entering the Konstructs seem to be the most developed. In the Konstruct you can currently play up to 3 different levels made by the developer. While three doesn’t sound like much, remember this is the Alpha version of the game. Not to mention, these levels were on the harder side. They were made to give users an idea of many of the gameplay mechanics of the game. You’re not downloading the first three levels, so the difficulty level may be higher than you might expect.

One thing you’ll immediately notice is it’s not the easiest game to control at first, but you do get better at it over time. About half an hour into the game I was already making attempts at rounding corners and sometimes even being successful. For those not familiar with first-person controls, you may have a harder time mastering the game than I did. While there’s a learning curve, I would say it’s about the same as other iOS First-person games such as Modern Combat .

The jumping mechanic has the steepest learning curve overall. While most first-person games tend to not allow the user to have much freedom over how fast they move using the joystick and instead result to a run button, Tesseract breaks the norm and gives the user a wide range of speed. From where you touch down on the joystick and how far up you move controls how far you’ll jump once you double tap the right side. The game gives you a lot of freedom in that respect and may throw users off as we’re typically very limited in that sense. It took awhile, but I eventually got the hang of it.

The map editor seemed well built and easy to use. While I’m terrible at building maps, I didn’t have any problem messing around with it. Since it’s fairly easy to use I expect a large custom map community, much like Dynamite Jack .

While there’s not too much to do in terms of consuming gameplay right now, [tesseract] looks very promising. Currently the game is just messing with the gameplay mechanics and map editor, but upon release [tesseract] will feature a full story explaining the mysterious Konstruct Laboratory, which already sounds very interesting from how the developer has described it. In short, [tesseract] is a game everyone should be keeping their eyes on.

For more information on [tesseract] visit the official websiteor subscribe on YouTube. To keep up to date with Douglas Warouw, the sole designer/programmer of [tesseract] , follow him on Twitterand Facebook. To participate in the Alpha be sure to grab it on the App Store.