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Generally favorable reviews - based on 15 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 113 Ratings

  • Summary: VVVVVV is a retro styled 2D platformer by Terry Cavanagh, creator of dozens of free games. You play as the fearless leader of a team of dimension exploring scientists who inadvertently crash, and are separated. The game involves exploring the strange world you've found yourself in, and reuniting your friends.

    VVVVVV explores one simple game mechanic: you cannot jump - instead, you reverse your own gravity at the press of a button. The game focuses on playing with this mechanic in a variety of interesting ways.

    The game is designed not to artificially gate your progress. In VVVVVV there are no locks, no power-ups, no switches, nothing to stop you progressing except the challenges themselves.
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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 13 out of 15
  2. Negative: 0 out of 15
  1. Sep 12, 2011
    100
    It's Terry Cavanagh's best game to date, and one of the best platformers I've ever played. If you have any interest in challenging platformers whatsoever, you'd be doing yourself a disservice not to pick up VVVVVV.
  2. Sep 12, 2011
    86
    An indie platform game with endearing retro looks, style, sophistication, and a sadistic streak. [Mar 2010, p.96]
  3. Sep 12, 2011
    82
    Fun, short and crazy hard but not frustrating. VVVVVV is just a nice, very well design piece of indie game.
  4. Sep 12, 2011
    70
    Sporadic difficulty notwithstanding, it's certainly a credit to Mr. Cavanagh that a project with VVVVVV's basic graphics and simple controls can feel so completely energetic and entertaining. Much more than it initially appears, I was quite glad to have spent time with the title, and eagerly look forward to what Terry will be cooking up next.

See all 15 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 36 out of 46
  2. Negative: 4 out of 46
  1. Very Fun Game! The retro-esque gravity defying platformer VVVVVV takes one back to the days of better gaming -- where skill actually matters because the reward is worth it. You'll find the game-play difficult but not overly so and the payoff of finding new areas or making an "impossible" maneuver worthwhile. The music gives me goosebumps and fits in quite well with the game -- that of exploring space in an strange and unknown dimension to find your crew-mates. Precision platforming -- retro style -- at its best! 10/10 Expand
  2. Awesome 2D platformer. Pretty difficult but doable. I like this game over super meat boy. Purchase when you have spare change, it will be worth it for sure. Expand
  3. Good: Excellent exploration, neat theme and pleasing music. Bad: it is tainted by some of the worst controls of a platformer I've ever had the frustration of using. The game itself is not hard, but the controls have been designed to be awkward. The time it takes to accelerate and decelerate is far too slow and so the handling is quite screwball. This would be forgiveable if the content did not sometimes require millisecond timing and precision within a few pixels, but that's exactly where most of the game's challenge is concentrated. The game gives you a very narrow and winding racetrack, but then puts you in a WW2 Jeep with rusted, stiff steering.

    The game tries to compensate for this by dumping a snowfall of save and reload points all over the place, but this does little if anything to reduce the frustration. It genuinely baffles me why the makers decided to inject so much potential frustration into it. Making the controls awkward does nothing to add to the game, it's the shallowest way I can think of to make the game seem longer.

    For improvement, you've got a great concept here, I loved the exploration and music/theme combo. But the physics of the controls are appalling.
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  4. Another rage-inducing "indie retro platformer." I'm not sure if anyone genuinely enjoys games like this or if they're designed as masochism simulators. No old platformers were nearly as hard as this and other recent similar titles (like super meat boy) so it must be some combination of purposefully making overly hard games coupled with cheapo graphics design. If you feel video games are just too easy for you lately and you enjoy platformers you should try this out but get ready to break your keyboard/gamepad over it. Expand

See all 46 User Reviews