CLOUDHEIM

Fantasy plus knockabout physics equals pinball wizardry

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One of the first control prompts that pops up in the opening tutorial of Cloudheim is for a triple-jump. It's a signal that beastman Runari is capable of athletic feats from the very start. We're also quickly introduced to a grapple beam that launches us towards hook points (or yanks objects and creatures towards us) with breezy simplicity. Movement, meanwhile, is almost too speedy – as if our avatar is overeager to obey our every command, motoring off at the slightest nudge of the stick. But that too is in service of an unfussy flow, prompting us to play the game as the developers hope it's going to be played.

Fundamentally, this is a crafting and building game, but one in which the combat and adventuring goes deeper than most. The same goes for the team play. “I wanted to try and mix different things that I love together in a new way,” Noodle Cat Games CEO David Ryan Hunt tells us.

Certainly, there's a touch of modern Zelda in there, given away by the game's visual style, as well as its action-RPG ambitions. And with Hunt having spent nine years on