Waveform review

Waveform feels very much like work. It’s a puzzle game where you alter the shape of a wavelength graph so that a ball travelling along it touches other specific balls without touching others. You can imagine how this might end up being the type of pulse-pounding display of mechanical skill that the developer might have intended, but the entire premise is just so unbelievably finicky and boring to play that it’s hard to believe anyone could have anticipated that it would be fun in the first place.

Really all you’re doing is lining up the wavelength with the orbs as they appear, and that’s it. I know it’s not exactly marketed like there’s something else going on, but I think it’s important to clarify that slowly, painstakingly lining things up while techno music tries its absolute hardest to give off the illusion that something exciting is happening feels so much like working the kind of shitty job that most of us play video games to forget that I truly couldn’t stomach playing it for long enough for it to even get properly difficult.

It’s another one of those ‘ideas’ sold as a finished product. Any amount of playtesting or even just regular playing would have revealed that this is the least fun thing you could ever do in a computer game and anybody with an imagination could come up with hundreds of ways to make this more interesting. I’d list some here, but it’s against my personal beliefs to put more effort into reviewing a game than the developer put into making it.