Sometimes, we think we sound like one of those stereotypical old men, who stand on a street corner, complaining to their friend about the youth of today. "When we were younger, we didn't have these fancy games machines. We didn't have your Xbox 360s, your Wiis, and your DSs (or GameStations and PlayBoxes as some parents still call them) - all we had were those little handheld plastic maze toys. And we liked them."
Challenging you to successfully roll a little metal ball from one end of a maze to the other, those "little plastic maze toys" were deceptive in their simplicity. Scattering various holes and other obstacles along the way for you to avoid, you needed a lot of manual dexterity, an ability to multitask, and quite a command of gravity to actually get to the end. And despite our amazing manual dexterity, which lay somewhere between on a par with a fish and a lizard, we still never managed them. At the last second, the ball would always decide it's time to defy gravity, end its pitiful existence, and dive into the nearest hole.
Luckily, however, as time's moved on, so too have our skills - and so too have the tilty-ball-through-maze-games.
Your explorers are so lazy, they can't even be bothered walking - instead, you've got to rotate the world around them, to get them to move.
Lazy Raiders is essentially an upgrade of the games of old - but without the hassle of having to worry about tilting things through three dimensions. With a number of archaeologically themed levels on offer, it's up to you to rotate the entire level (using either the analogue stick, or the trigger), and roll your portly explorer (the Lazy Raider in question) around the world, collecting the various gems, and avoiding the traps, before landing them safely on the treasure. As with many games, it's actually a lot trickier than it sounds.
The earlier levels help you get to grips with the concept, and learn the basics of rotating the level, as your Lazy Raider rolls with gravity, and bounces into walls like you'd imagine a rotund, lazy explorer would, if trapped inside a room that was rotating. It doesn't take long for the odds to start stacking up, however, as you find the levels quickly become populated with various traps, enemies, and all sorts of other obstacles are introduced.
Avoiding the bad guys and traps can get quite hard on the later levels, and takes quite a bit of planning.
The main problem you'll have to contend with here is that as you rotate the level, everything inside it moves. If you want to move your plump adventurer from one end of the level to the other, it's not as simple as just rotating the whole level 90 degrees to the right, and watching as he plummets, because any enemies, boulders, or other baddies in the level will come with you - and, thanks to gravity, they'll more than likely end up either right next to you, or on top of you (damn you Newton!)
This all means that in most levels, you'll end up having to concentrate on, and keep track of several things at a time, as you try to work out how tilting the level a few degrees to the left will affect everything. It certainly helps keep things interesting, but it can get more than a little bit frustrating, as your explorer gets prodded by a boulder and squished, as you realise that was the one intangible in the entire level that you hadn't taken into account.
Of course, this also adds a lot of strategy to the game too, as you have to work out the best way to deal with the enemies, as separating two people, when everyone moves in the same direction is tricky to say the least. Thankfully, the A button goes a long way to helping you solve a lot of the problems, as it flips the maze over, meaning you can happily land your explorer on a ledge, while the bad guy plummets to the other end of the maze, and far away from you.
It's hard to get away from someone when they're both ruled by the same gravity.
Each level has a number of things for you to collect and try and achieve - if you want to collect all the artefacts, you'll first have to find all the gems in the level, with new artefacts appearing as you collect more of the gems - or, to get an even higher end of level bonus (and make your job a lot easier) you can try and take out the traps - either by landing an explosive box next to a jet of fire (which takes out the jet as the box explodes), or by rolling a boulder onto a set of spikes (or an unlucky enemy).
It's when you really try to go for these things that you realise how clever some of Lazy Raiders' levels are. Certain levels have to be finished in a certain order if you want to complete all of the objectives, and so trying to take out the enemies, and the traps, whilst keeping your Lazy Raider in relative safety becomes an incredible challenge - but one that, for the most part, is fun rather than frustrating.
Why would you want to play as your avatar when you can play as the intermitable Dr. Diggabones. Check out the moustache on that.
However, Lazy Raiders isn't a game without its problems. On some levels, it doesn't seem fair that certain objects fall faster than your character - especially when gravity is a constant. The other thing that can sometimes be a major problem, when you're trying to rotate your character through a tight gap, is that the level often just won't rotate quickly enough - leaving you endlessly circling the thing you're trying to get through. It's also not as kid friendly as the visuals, and name may make it seem - the precision that you require with the analogue stick means that many younger children will struggle to make it past the first few levels.
All in all, Lazy Raiders is a great game - but it's not without its flaws. With an interesting concept, it's a game that will tax your brain, but not your pocket, costing only £6.80 for 80 levels of fun, and an estimated (by the developers) 11 hours of gameplay, it's a great investment too.
Not quite the Xbox Live Aracde's long lost treasure, but a nice little gem all the same.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
