SEUM: Speedrunners From Hell Review: Xbox One
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAYUH!!!! Grab your Gibson Flying V, pick up a 6 pack of Bud Heavies, tighten up that Slayer bandanna and get ready to nosedive right into hell. The headbangers over at Pine Studios and Head Up Games have brought to us metal heads a “heavy metal first-person platformer. Like a bastard child of Quake 3 and Super Meat Boy”, plucked right from the horse’s mouth at Pine Studio. Dr. Bob, not only your local horror movie aficionado, but also your favorite rock of all kinds fan, is coming to you live with my personal Review of SEUM: Speedrunners From Hell which should be available on Xbox One for purchase next Tuesday on September 12th.
SEUM: Spedrunners From Hell, as quoted above, is a first person hyper paced platformer where speed, precision, and twitch fingers are key. The game starts out with some cool hand drawn cinematics bolstered by heavy guitar rifs as Satan kicks down your door, cuts off your hand and steals your beer. In proper fashion you frisbee a record right back at Satan lopping his fireball shooting hand off and hey guess what? The only thing you can do know is to attach Satan’s hand to your stump and plummet into the rings of Hell to get your beer back. SEUM begins as an incredibly simplistic fast paced platformer in which you find yourself sprinting and jumping between hovering platforms over pools of lava in order to get to a blue chained gate to move onto the next level. As you progress level to level you quickly realize that the difficulty spikes pretty quickly, but the purpose of this is to get the player thinking, how does I approach these obstacles best, how can I get through this level fast enough, how can I best utilize this PowerUp to maneuver the level? Speaking of PowerUps, certain levels have orbs that can allow you to levitate, teleport, and create platforms out of mid air in order to traverse each level’s set of obstacles. You soon find out, you will need to get very creative with these PowerUps, because the difficulty of each level grows exponentially with each successful completion of the previous level.
As many Pewdiepie fans would know, the “Just Like Dark Souls” meme is in full bloom when it comes to SEUM: Speedrunners From Hell. There is a learning curve that you hit pretty quickly but Just Like Dark Souls, it is incredibly satisfying when you finally complete a level that’s been busting your ass over and over again. The gameplay is fluid and the movements feel cohesive, the PowerUp abilities take a little bit to get used to, especially the one that allows you to create platforms in mid air. Judging the leap distance to where you create the platform becomes an art that is not easy to master. The Rewind Time and Levitate abilities are pretty straight forward and the Teleportation also takes a little getting used to. Each level also has several hidden collectibles adding to the already immense amount of replay value that comes in the competitive time trials with over 100 levels and the ability for player created maps. I have yet to see any player made maps because the game hasn’t officially launched publicly yet… and I have actual proof that I was the first person to get onto the Xbox One servers, but I picture the level creation to be pretty standard, and nothing too crazy like Little Big Planet scale.
The soundtrack is brilliantly padded with heavy metal music guiding you through the depths of hell as you try to retrieve your coveted case of beer. The gameplay is solid and enjoyable, the amount of replayability, especially in the form of a tremendous amount of levels out now and more soon to come is a huge boon. The graphics are a little outdated, but the environments and aesthetic are on point with the whole morbid desolation of a hell landscape, fitted with flowing lava pits, acidic drop points, spouting fire, spikes, bombs, axes and pretty much anything that you would imagine could kill you…I’m pretty sure I saw my ex down there, harpy flying around the lava pits spitting venom at the motionless skeletons trying to succubus them too. If you enjoy fast paced platforming games with a competitive nature to them in the form of leaderboard rankings, SEUM: Speedrunners From Hell is a steal at 15$.
SEUM: SpeedRunners From Hell
4 Decapitating Swinging Axes out of 5
