From the Archives: Gravity Circuit
C'mon dude. Let me touch your pipes.
Notice
I initially wrote this post in 2023 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those, like this one, that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.
I played the demo for this last year1 and was immediately enthralled by it. I spread the word as best I could, and was hoping the game would make it out by the end of 2022… obviously that didn’t happen, but it turns out we didn’t have to wait too much longer - it came out a few days ago, and I picked it up almost immediately.
Gravity Circuit is obviously inspired by the Mega Man series, but not any one of them in particular. There are eight robot ma-I mean Circuits, each with their own themed stage, which you can tackle in any order after an introductory level. The graphics are 8-bit styled, but the gameplay is a bit more like the MMX games or Zero series, with wall jumping, dashes, and specials in addition to slides. The main difference from Mega Man is your primary weapon - instead of a lemon-shooter, you have a melee button which combines with the d-pad inputs to give you a solid range of quick jabs, uppercuts, and drop kicks. Melee hits stagger most smaller enemies, letting you close the distance and start pummeling them if you can dodge their initial attack. You also have a grappling hook, which can be fired off in eight directions. Hits with the grappling hook do minimal damage, but can also grab onto walls and ceilings to let you swing or simply hang above danger. Finally, when enemies are killed, their corpses remain as greyed out husks - if you continue beating on them, they turn red and explode, but you can also use your grappling hook to yank them back into your grip and carry them around. Releasing the hook button then launches the enemy corpse in the direction you’re holding, causing huge amounts of impact damage, and usually one-shotting a normal enemy.
Partway through the intro stage you get your first burst move, which lets you consume energy from destroyed enemies to do a powerful slide kick that even sends bosses careening - after each stage boss, you unlock another few extra moves you can equip [four in total] to give you a wide range of offensive, defensive, and utility abilities - my favorites were the parry counterattack, the arc of electric projectiles, and the suplex tackle, but you can swap them out any time you like once you unlock and buy them. You also have three passive ability slots - you purchase more by finding and rescuing Metal Slug-esque POW robots in secrets throughout the stages.
Some of the passives are pretty powerful - one gives you full i-frames on slides, another lets you double jump, and there are two that just give flat damage reduction from enemy and stage hazards respectively. Like the burst moves, you can swap any unlocked passives around at any time, giving you a lot of flexibility to, say, swap out your magnet to pull in money drops for longer reach on normal attacks when you go into a boss fight.
The stages are great, and each has a bunch of unique gimmicks and hazards. They’re long without dragging on too much, and have decently spaced checkpoints. There are no lives, so the only specific penalty for dying is losing part of your cash bonus at the end of a stage, but you can also spend money at the checkpoints for a full refill on health and burst energy - especially important at the ones right before bosses, since you respawn without any burst energy to do special moves. Being able to pay a small fee to roll into the fight with a couple specials ready to go is a nice feature, though all the bosses are plenty doable without using any, and the bosses do spill some energy at their halfway mark.
Between missions you can explore the little HQ zone and talk to some NPCs, more of which show up as you beat levels and rescue POWs. This is also where you buy the passive abilities and burst moves, but other than that, there’s not much that’s too exciting to find. You have to pay to expand your enemy and character gallery, even after you find the chips for each entry, and the entries themselves aren’t terribly interesting or even funny. Besides finding POWs, each stage also has one permanent upgrade, either to your max health or burst energy gauge, and if you miss anything you can replay a stage to find it, although you probably don’t really need to to finish the game.
After beating all eight normal stages, you move on to Wily-I mean the Ark, a series of gauntlets that really cap off the game well, and have some of the coolest bossfights I’ve seen in a while. There’s a sort of mirror match, the final boss fight is challenging but fun, and it’s got my favorite take on the boss refights in any Mega Man style game. Even with damage reduction and most of the permanent upgrades, the very end took me enough attempts that I started to get a wrist cramp, but it was worth putting up with. I wound up beating the game on Normal, and while it was fun, I’d say it’s maybe a little too easy. I’m playing back through on Hard, which is possibly a tiny bit overtuned - not only are there additional enemies, everything has about one more hit extra health, you take more damage, and your health gain from the hidden energy tanks is halved. It certainly still seems doable, but I think maybe one of those changes could go, or be rolled into an even higher difficulty, leaving Hard as a challenging but not brutal option.
I loved the game, but there were a handful of letdowns. I really enjoyed how much variety you had with passives and burst moves, but some of them felt kind of useless or just too hard to use comparatively, and though I’m sure you could get good with any of them with a little practice, I wound up mostly sticking to the first couple I was used to. Especially odd are the three or so abilities that basically just give you an extra jump in some way - the game’s designed from top to bottom to never require double jump, even for secrets, so I almost never even equipped one, much less the other movement ‘boosts’ like the ability to stick to walls without sliding or slow your falling. Secrets are mostly concealed behind slightly cracked walls, and they’re usually not hard to spot, but missing exactly one POW in a stage and only having a vague indication of how far in they might be really kills any incentive to go back in and try to find them - moreso for the permanent upgrades because you don’t get any indication where they are. Finally, the music is good, and never stood out as annoying or unfitting, but that’s all - it never stood out whatsoever. It’s a little unfair to make a direct comparison to Mega Man here, since that series has some of the best videogame songs of all time, but it’s worth noting that none of the tracks are particularly memorable.
Gravity Circuit is a gorgeous, fast, and challenging platformer that takes all the best of the 8 and 16 bit eras, wraps it in gorgeous and well animated pixel art, and lasts just long enough to make you want more. $17 is pretty high for an unknown indie dev making a Mega Man clone, but this is probably the best Mega Man clone ever made, and definitely better than some real Mega Man games.
Afterward
Since launch [which I finished the above write-up shortly after] the game has gotten multiple very substantial updates, including too many minor quality of life and bits of polish to even list. Some of the major new features include:
A speedrun mode that skips all dialogue and cutscenes
Loadout sets that can be swapped around more easily
Armor paints, each with a unique ability or effect while equipped
A whole set of extra difficulty modifiers that can be layered onto the standard difficulty options, including remixed levels and altered enemy behavior
The ability to warp to any checkpoint in an already completed mission to make finding secrets less tedious
I did beat the Hard mode shortly after writing this, and I replayed the game again later that year. Even just by the end of 2023, Gravity Circuit had made a strong enough impression on me to rank as my third favorite game of the year.
But the real reason I’m breaking my own schedule for posting old write-ups is that the developer has just announced a sequel, and is promoting it by offering this first game as free-to-claim for a short time on Steam. [and is on sale on every other platform] So if you want to try one of the best action games in the past decade, now is your chance. I couldn’t recommend it more at any price.
Gravity Circuit can be purchased on Switch, Playstation 4, GOG, and claimed [for now] on Steam.
2022