Direct

Direct is a small but intensely focused arcade game developed and published by ToastieLabs. Released in 2017, it takes the basic idea of navigating through obstacles and builds an entire score-attack experience around speed, rhythm, reaction time, and repeated attempts at improvement. Instead of presenting a lengthy campaign or complicated collection of mechanics, the game concentrates on a straightforward challenge that players can understand almost immediately. Its simplicity is intentional, making it particularly suited to short sessions while still providing reasons to return and pursue higher scores. At its core, Direct combines rhythm-inspired audiovisual presentation with fast obstacle avoidance. Players move through sequences of hazards while trying to survive each set successfully. Every cleared sequence contributes points, meaning that staying alive and performing consistently are directly connected to progression. The controls and objectives are uncomplicated, but the gradually increasing speed creates the real challenge. What initially feels manageable can become considerably more demanding as reaction windows shrink and mistakes become increasingly difficult to correc…

My reaction times suck, and if I wrote this review upon completion of the game it would be negative. However, time has passed and frustration has calmed.

I would not recommend this to anyone I feel this is straight seizure induced game that would mess anyone up wow bright game then every thing you pass darkens then repeat on next you pass it becomes white again! Then rainbow chasing does not help bro!

Gameplay wise. Direct is decent, although if you want to go for all the achievements it becomes a massive slog to higher difficulties basically requiring you to grind to 3,000 for slow mode (which makes the game EXTREMELY dull because of how slow it actually is.) Then again the game is only $1 so it's not like it's a rip-off or anything. However, on my device the game was completely unable to run without going into the advanced system settings on my computer and adding an environmental variable that this game apparently requires to run without crashing. Without this I was unable to go past 20 score on easy mode (so I basically couldn't play). Due to this instability, and the fact that the developer has no warning or fix for this gamebreaking issue, I cannot in good conscience recommend this game. The solution I used can be found in the community forums with [url=https://steamcommunity.com/app/675720/discussions/0/4042609512665342091/] this link [/url]. It worked for me so if you decide to buy this game for the achievements hopefully it works for you as well.

It's crazy that this game even costs any money. It feels like some teenager made this. I mean, I've literally met so many teenagers who could make a better game than this. As someone else already said, the ambient music isn't very "music" but rather noise. At first I didn't mind the background but after progressing and after listening to it for a while, it quickly became super annoying and repetitive. The music randomly turned off in normal mode and in all of them, the time where the song ends and repeats is super obvious. There is absolutely no reason for a game like this to be so damn laggy. There would be times where the game froze for a split second, and I believe it was even internally lagging because I was getting the "you played this game for 30 minutes" achievement once I was already an hour in and the "you played this game for 90 minutes" achievement once I was a couple hours in. Speaking of achievements, there is one achievement for every 5 obstacle rows you pass which goes by super quickly so you'll have a bunch of achievements spamming when you're going fast. It would've been better if they reduced it to better milestones. There's also achievements for when you get 500 …

Not a bad game, the higher difficulties are pretty hard.