Style Over Substance In This Neon Platformer
Come to Parkour Labs in hope of uncovering a test-chambered Mirror’s Edge, and you’ll be left extremely disappointed. In fact, we’d tell you to go and play the worst of those games – Mirror’s Edge Catalyst – if you’re after a proper parkouring experience.
Instead Parkour Labs is a pretty hardcore, first person platformer, in which you’re left to navigate your way through a series of obstacle courses, jumping, double jumping, and dashing your way to success. And yes, Parkour Labs, therefore, lives and dies by the same rules as every first-person platformer, meaning your time with it could well be full of frustration, anger and a shed load of hope. Don’t expect any parkouring either. This may sell itself as an ‘Ultimate Parkour Game’, but it’s not. It’s nothing but straight up first person platforming.
And unfortunately, even if Parkour Labs was a parkour based test lab affair, we’d still tell you to keep away. In fact, there are times in which this feels like it is verging on broken.
A Great Look Can’t Hide The Problems
We’ll get into that later, and kick things off with a bit of a positive. We love the visual set up of this one. Vaporwave inspired, it’s about as clean and retro as you can get, with neon lights and platforming edges glowing for as far as you can see. You’ve got bright blues, deep purples, a rising sun drawing you ever closer to your goal; a goal that consists of leaping from one platform to another, as precisely, as can be.
Fail, fall to your death, and Parkour Labs will have you instantly respawning, ready to go again in a mere second. It all creates a surprisingly inviting place to spend time, despite the relentless challenge. The minimalist approach means there’s never any visual clutter getting in the way of your next jump either, with every glowing platform and brightly coloured edge clearly directing you towards the next objective.
Inconsistent Movement Makes Every Jump A Gamble
We can’t fault SoyKhaler, Entorno Virtual, and Pdpartid@games for that aspect of things, nor the minimalistic, but rather delightful backing tunes that accompany all this jumping and leaping.
What we can fault them for though is everything else. We’ve been sat on this review for a good few weeks, hoping, thinking that it may be us, that a patch or fix may be rolled out to Xbox in order to solve some issues that Parkour Labs has. But nothing has materialised and as such, we’re left with a game that is extremely frustrating, to the point where I see no reason to ever fire it up again.
A lack of tutorial is not an issue. This is about as simple as you can get as you jump, double jump, turbo dash, and place yourself onto the platforming arenas ahead of you. But seeing as this is set in the first person, making those jumps is tricky, more so as consistency of the leaps is rarely on point. At some times you may leap into the sky, others, you’ll fall to your death, seemingly for no reason. Similar goes for the turbo dash too – we’ve sat here pulling off that dash dozens, hundreds of times, and we don’t think that any one dash has been the same as that which has gone before it. When you’re combining a jump, a dash, a leap onto a bouncy platform, all with the need to land precisely, Parkour Labs fast struggles.
Simple Ideas Are Let Down By Poor Execution
Thankfully, understanding the environment isn’t particularly difficult, as platform colours quickly become second nature. For instance, pink platforms are safe landing spots, blue ones launch you skywards, yellow platforms vanish beneath your feet after a (very) short while, whilst red surfaces spell instant death; you’ll do well to keep away from those. It’s a simple system that keeps the focus firmly on movement, even if the first person viewpoint then goes some way to ensure precision landings become nigh on impossible.
And that’s the biggest disappointment of all. Parkour Labs wants players to master movement through repetition, learning the intricacies of every jump and every dash until each level becomes second nature. That’s a great idea in theory. The problem is that mastery only works when the controls and mechanics work. Here, it feels like they rarely do. When success or failure can feel dictated as much by inconsistent movement as your own skill, it’s difficult to ever build the confidence needed to tackle some super demanding stages.
There are 60 stages to work through in total, each introducing slightly tougher platform layouts and trickier combinations of hazards. On paper, that’s a decent amount of content. In reality, the enjoyment of making your way through them depends almost entirely on whether you can make peace with the game’s movement. Thankfully, most levels, or at least those which we have played, can be completed in a matter of seconds, easily less than a minute. A timer builds up in the top left corner as you play, constantly climbing along with your fall count alongside it. But frankly, there’s little reason to worry about your time, as Parkour Labs never really gives you an incentive to improve or compare your performances.
With one stage leading into another pretty quickly, there’s thankfully no hanging about in Parkour Labs. And that is a godsend, because the less time you spend with this one, the better all round.
Technical Issues Compound The Frustration
There are two massive issues for us though. Firstly, Parkour Labs is a right bugger in terms of difficulty. You’ll fly through the early stages with ease, at least once you get to grips with the inconsistent mechanics. Yet then it ramps up pretty significantly. From there, should you dare to even think about heading into the menu to take a look at the stage levels present, everything just breaks, chucking you straight back to the very first stage. It very much feels like the menu system is broken, with the opportunity to pick from selected previously completed stages a no-no, opening, and then auto-closing at will. Worse still, should you actually want to revisit a previously completed stage, we never found a reliable way of doing so without completely quitting out of the game , dashboarding, and restarting it.
That’s not just inconvenient – it feels like something that should never have made it into a release build. We have a feeling we should be blaming Xbox Series’ Quick Resume functions for that issue, but whatever it is, it’s highly annoying.
A Leap Best Taken Elsewhere
Which means we sit here disappointed with Parkour Labs. We’ve spent weeks hoping something would change. Dipping in, dropping out, crossing fingers in hope. But nothing has. We’re left with a brutally tricky first person platformer that wants to be a parkour experience, but forgets what parkour actually is. It’s frustrating because there are glimpses of a decent little first-person platformer hidden beneath the neon glow. Unfortunately, inconsistent mechanics and a broken level system stop Parkour Labs from ever reaching those heights.
As it stands, Parkour Labs is one to run away from. Make the leap elsewhere.
Important Links
Parkour Labs Turns Movement Into An Art Form – https://www.thexboxhub.com/parkour-labs-turns-movement-into-an-art-form/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/parkour-labs/9nr54xr41rk8
