I’d love using an exercise bike if it weren’t for the fact that the seat made my ass hurt.

After a recent trip to the doctor I discovered that my blood pressure was a little high and my bloodwork was showing signs of too much fat going on in my liver. As a result, I had to change my diet a bit, reduce the food intake, and start exercising as many days a week as possible. The results? Good so far, but my original hope for exercise was quickly dashed by the simple discomfort of the exercise bike.

See, on paper, it’s the perfect machine for a fat geek such as myself. I can read while I’m on the bike, or play games on my 3DS. I could actually get more than 100 pages into The Darkness That Comes Before or continue my effort to complete the first volume of Otherland by Tad Williams. Or perhaps it would provide an opportunity to get some grinding done in Bravely Default, for example.

Yet in truth, by fifteen minutes my mind stops focusing on whatever is before me, as I’m instead too distracted by the ache of my rump trying to conform around the strangely shaped seat, not too mention what felt like a lack of circulation from other parts of that all-too-valuable region. Instead, I simply minimize how often I listen to music during my work day so that I can listen to it while on the treadmill, enjoying every pounding beat and wailing melody as I walk in place. Turns out it’s better for me anyway.

Back in January I played through Outland, a Ubisoft published downloadable side-scroller that was free on Playstation Plus. I had heard that if you liked Metroid you’d like Outland, which pretty much meant it was my kind of game. Theoretically, at least.

That theory was bupkis. It held about as much water as the theory that Earth is only a few thousand years old.

The sad truth of Outland, and also the reason why it took me so long to figure out how to write about it, is that the game is a lot like an exercise bike. On paper, it’s a fantastic idea that ought to work out wonderfully. In execution, there’s some major set of flaws that constantly distract from what does or should work.

Oddly enough, I’ve also played a bit of Star Fox lately as research for a piece on GamersWithJobs, and the sequels to that franchise seemed to suffer the same fate that Outland’s entire design had. Each game works better when played in a more arcade style.

For Outland, that’s partially due to the clear influence top-down shooter Ikaruga had on the game’s concept. The player must swap between light and dark powers in order to avoid damage from certain obstacles and foes, while also dealing damage to enemies of a specific color. In other words, just like Ikaruga, but swapped over to another game genre.

When you’re trading off each power during platforming segments, timing the shift mid-jump as you pass through torrents of chromatic energy, that’s when the game is at its best. Sometimes you get a chance to think each platforming puzzle through, other times you have to rush through and rely on quick-thinking and cat-like reflexes to keep you safe from harm. You will fail, that is for certain, but you get back up and try again.

This is the game at its best, even when it is at its most head-meet-desk frustrating. Unfortunately, the game is simply too large to be littered with such interesting platforms at all times. This is where the game starts to become problematic.

The upgrades don’t make the game more interesting, they simply pad it out. Due to the art style, they aren’t quite so cleverly hidden, either. There’s little joy to exploring this world, as the art style begs a degree of simplicity. That simplicity means every nook, corner and cranny will look the same as the last, with very few changes. Each screen is simply a single contrasting foreground overlayed in a new manner over the brightly colored background, with few features to make any one bit of environment memorable or curious. A player will explore not because they want to or are driven to do so, but because the game has decided that is what the player shall do in order to earn minor rewards.

Each map is then populated with a variety of foes, many of whom are simply too much work to take down despite their sheer numbers. Unlike Ikaruga, whose entire design was centered around combat, there is nothing to really enjoy here. The enemies do not exhibit interesting A.I., many of their attacks are simply too powerful or too hard to evade, and the player has few interesting moves available. Combat feels clunky rather than smooth and empowering, and as such it becomes frustrating when you’re spending a couple of hours treading through identical screens with few rewards but bountiful in frustrating foes.

The only time combat is truly rewarding is when you find yourself up against a boss, where the confrontation is designed like a puzzle. In other words, boss fights have more in common with the platforming puzzles than they do the various foes, a test of the player’s reflexes and quick-thinking. Each boss is interesting in their very own way and tests the player’s new abilities in a creative manner. The only real negative is none of the bosses have any checkpoints, despite having lengthy phases that can be quite irritating to repeat.

If Outland had scrapped the foes and exploration, focusing instead on smaller, faster, but more polished platforming levels concluding with challenging but worthwhile boss fights, it would have been a smaller game, but all the more gratifying. Some concepts are not intended to be big, story-driven epics, and Outland plays as if it would have been a better arcade style game. An evolution of the more simple Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis games, designed to be completed in two hours instead of two days or two weeks.

There is an “arcade” mode that the player can unlock, but it’s more of a time-attack, encouraging the player to replay the overlong levels in as little time as possible. In truth, the game simply needed to carve out whole chunks of these maps, making them smaller but scaled better and more tightly knit, culminating in that final boss fight at the end. Then it would be a game I not only played once, but would have played again and again.

Instead, it is no different than the exercise bike. It was a nice attempt, but despite all of its potential it just left me too sore in the end.