Weight And Momentum
How movement feels, measured
Six games, ordered as they appear in the issue. Each review opens with the measured figures and then argues about them.
The order is the order of the issue rather than a ranking. Two of these games have movement we consider excellent, one has movement that contradicts its own fiction, and one is physically impossible and better for it.
Heavy action, and the heaviest numbers in the issue: eleven frames to full speed, nineteen to stop, four frames of uncancellable commitment on a direction change. We break down the entire moveset and then disagree about whether the first hour is a filter or a mistake.
Two frames of acceleration, an instant stop, full air control and a jump arc that discards momentum at the apex. None of it is physical and all of it is right, and the review sets out why a precision platformer that modelled mass properly would be a worse game.
The clearest case of physics and fiction disagreeing that we have measured. The vehicles are described, modelled and lit as extremely heavy, and they corner, stop and recover like something a quarter of the stated mass. The gap is measurable and it undermines everything above it.
Undamped zero-gravity movement with no brake and no assistance. A bad push costs up to nine seconds of helpless drift, and the game declines to soften it. We measured every push in a two-hour session and found the distribution of outcomes far harsher than it feels.
A traversal game with a hidden generosity: released inputs keep 82% of speed for eleven frames, and mistimed inputs resolve into slower correct moves rather than failures. It took a while to find, and once found it explains why the game feels better than the player is playing.
The best movement system in the issue and the one that asks most of the player. Steps complete once begun, turning is a sequence rather than an input, and the camera shake sits deliberately off the step cadence so the machine reads as straining rather than marching.
The six games in issue seven were not chosen to be comparable and the comparison is the most useful thing in it. Two of them — the weightless platformer and the twenty-two-tonne walker — sit at opposite ends of every figure we record, and both are excellent. Whatever makes movement good is therefore not a number, and any publication that measures numbers has to say so early and often.
What the numbers do is expose disagreement between a game's parts. Review three is a negative review not because sixteen tonnes handling like four is unrealistic but because the game spends its art, sound and writing insisting on mass its physics does not deliver. The player feels the contradiction long before they can name it, and the frame counts are how it gets named.
The bench notes in this issue cover two techniques we use constantly and had never explained: how to read a jump arc from capture, and how to measure a turning circle in a game that does not tell you its units.