Wait – The One Button Game Collections Can Be Enjoyable?
When we reviewed the first two One Button game collections (One Button Games 5-in-1 and One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 2), the only button that we wanted to press was the Off button. But something rather exciting has happened with volume 3. Against the odds, it’s not bad at all. Our frowns have been turned upside down.
Enough talk – to the games! We’ll present them in the intended order – how they are shown in the Main Menu of One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 3.
Twin P – 3 / 5
Twin P is insane. I’m not sure I’d go as far as liking it, but there’s an ungainly charm that reminded me of Clumsy Rush and Octodad. You are two P letters separated by an elastic band. Press A once, and a P is lifted off the ground, rotating around the other P. Press A again, and that rotating P is planted into the ground. Now the other P is circling. Circular step, circular step, circular step.
This is how you ‘walk’ in Twin P. And you’re going to need to walk, as bombs are wending their way towards you. If a P or elastic band touches the bomb, the P will stand for Perished. To complicate things even further, points are gained for picking up coins, and holding the A button allows you to stretch your P out further to grab them.
It’s a drunken stumble of a game. It’s not something I’d play regularly – it’s too counter-intuitive for that – but I can imagine pausing a couch co-op Jackbox stint to show it off.
Revolve A – 4 / 5
Now we’re talking. Revolve A is the jewel in One Button Games 5-in-1 vol.3’s crown.
Revolve A is a simple take on Asteroids. Press nothing and your ship will spinny-bounce around the screen. But press A, and you will gently thrust in the direction that your ship is pointing.
Where Revolve A gets clever is the combat. You don’t shoot, nor do you throw up shields. All you have is your ship. Instead, when there are enemies in proximity of each other, they get electrically charged by each other and a tether appears. Slalom through this tether and all connected enemies explode, netting you points. But don’t hit the enemies themselves: that’s how you wind up dead.
Wait it out, and dozens of enemies appear on screen. They’re all tethered to each other like a net, and you can dash through a single thread to explode them all. Points multiply, and you’re looking at a healthy score.
There’s a wonderful rhythm here, holding back and then lunging in. The payoff of a score-explosion is just the icing on Revolve A’s cake.
Two Lane – 3.5 / 5
Two Lane, or something like it, is probably the game that would pop into my head if forced to make a one-button game. There’s something inevitable about a retro-racer where A switches between two lanes. Tap it quickly to move out of the way of incoming walls, and grab as many coins as you can.
Two Lane has a secret sauce, though. The base of that sauce is generosity: it doesn’t mind all that much if you crash into a wall. As long as you switch into a free lane soon after, you’re fine. You’ve lost a bit of speed, but that’s it. Things get problematic if you hit a sequence of walls, though. Like Keanu’s Speed, if you drop below a certain MPH, your car is toast.
Two Lane gets frantic. But the leeway it offers you means that there’s some substance. You’re not restarting every five seconds; you’re managing your speed levels as well as you can, and that’s a neat twist on an age-old formula.
D Laser – 2.5 / 5
I like that D Laser exists. It’s doing something completely new, and while it didn’t quite work for me, there’s a faint outline of genius to it.
At the top of the screen is a laser that is building up to fire. As soon as a pink horizontal line reaches a red horizontal line, the whole screen fills up with death. You can’t fight back: all you can do is hide behind barricades that fall down the screen. If you’re behind one when the laser fires, you survive to hide another day.
The thing is, this is a one-button game, so you don’t have a huge amount of control. You move side-to-side, and A changes direction. Holding A stops you in your tracks – but slows down the laser’s advance too. So, you’re pivoting towards barricades at the last moment, frantically tapping to try to keep yourself in place.
I love the idea of D Laser, I really do. But the margins are so fine – even a nicked pixel will lose you health – and the controls are incredibly unwieldy. The ‘hold’ mechanic never quite felt right, either. By pausing the laser at the same time as pausing the player, the hold button never seemed to have a use-case for us. We ended up ignoring it.
Chalk D Laser up as a curio, and one that could lead to better ideas.
Mirror Floor – 1.5 / 5
Mirror Floor just doesn’t match the quality of the other games here. It felt like a hangover from One Button Games 5-in-1 vol.2, which contained ideas rather than games.
It’s an endless runner where the main character has a mirror version on the other side of the platform. That other version is a ghostly echo that isn’t the one you’re controlling. Everything shifts when you jump. As soon as you leap, you become the mirror version of yourself.
That sounds fine and dandy, but the next platform may be too high for you to reach. So, you need to anticipate this and jump beforehand. Now you’re the mirror-version and can fall onto the platform, such is the way that Mirror Floor’s dual gravity works.
It just never feels satisfying or learnable. The platforms often aren’t long enough to switch characters, and the fast speed means you have to be psychic. Mirror Floor feels like endless-running, but with our shoelaces tied together.
And in summary…
One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 3 is a huge improvement over the previous two games. Honestly, I’ve mentally adjusted: before, I thought that there was no point to collections like these. The one-button barrier, plus the rudimentary nature of the graphics, just wasn’t going to lead to anything worthwhile.
One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 3 proves me wrong. More specifically, Revolve A, Twin P and Two Lane have proved me wrong. They show that, with some wild invention and riffs on arcade classics, you can make one-button games that are fun for more than five seconds.
Maybe the prospect of vol. 4 isn’t as harrowing as we first thought.
Important Links
One Button Games 5-in-1 Vol. 3 Delivers Five New Minimalist Challenges – https://www.thexboxhub.com/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-3-delivers-five-new-minimalist-challenges/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-3/9N3NJZQX6RGM/0010
Take in a One Button Games mega-bundle – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/one-button-games-5-in-1-all-volumes-bundle/9PDSJSHQ666B/0010/B1V77T2ZF3R1
