Layla’s blood type is O-negative, so you know her goth phase will never end. Given this knowledge, it’s no surprise that her telepathic abilities should manifest the way they do. Her personal shield is the same umbrella that Jenna Ortega carried in Wednesday’s poster for the Addams Family reboot. Her time-travel technique is a kind of spooky ghost elevator—the kind you might take to visit David S. Pumpkin, or Leo’s dead wife in Inception. Then there’s Vampire Ex: Layla’s ultimate power and the ultimate homage to Twilight.
It’s the trademark “ding!” Yet even after finishing my Redfall review and discovering that Arkane’s latest FPS fell short, I still couldn’t get my hands off the elevator. Layla’s elevator is a leftist, bizarre and truly memorable way to get around.
Here’s how it works: anytime the cooldown allows, Layla can pick a plane at short to medium distances and summon a translucent pink-purple rectangle, which is unmistakably an elevator. It has one of those Bostwick doors you see in creepy old hotels, with metal lattices that slide through to let you in and out. It’s not that Layla uses the door: it’s a ghostly elevator in which she travels straight through the shimmering film before being suddenly launched high into the air.
Once this happens, you realize two things. First, your arc is slow and malleable, allowing you to make turns and course corrections in mid-air. Second, fall damage is temporarily disabled after being raised, allowing you to fall from great distances without taking damage. It’s a setup that makes learning and experimenting fun rather than punishing.
Still, it’s a weird trick. On the one hand, Redfall is a town built by the makers of Dishonored, so it gives you a lot of vertical space to explore: rooftops to walk on, and upstairs windows to climb. On the other hand, it’s an open world with targets spread across its New England location. There is no vehicle and the elevator does not help to shorten the distance. In terms of ballistics, it’s more like cannon fire than a gun bullet, without any horizontal velocity advantage.
During Redfall’s opening hours, I longed to own one of Far Cry’s gliders—a way to glide myself from the front door of the hillside hub into the seaside suburb below. But that pain faded as I filled the elevator’s upgrade tree with points, and I began to appreciate Arkane forcing me to hug the old-fashioned bounce mat in my back pocket.
In some ways, this is an evolution of the traversal capabilities that Arkane has been working on for a decade. In 2012’s Dishonored, the developers introduced Blink, a game-changing magical teleport that lets you close gaps and find far-flung routes through the rafters of its levels. Blink is nimble and reliable, following your intent, placing you exactly where it’s intended, every time.
The turning point of Dishonored 2 is the Crusade, an outsider’s supernatural gift to protagonist and princess Emily Kaldwin. It allows her to reach dist ant points by grabbing them with tendrils—grappling hooks from the void—and firing them in the air. So far, so wink. It’s just that, unlike its predecessor, Far Reach is bound by the laws of physics like inertia. If you jump from the ground to the rafters, momentum can take you to higher places, creating new potential for screwing up and mastering skills.
Layla’s elevator is harder to master and becomes more useful over time. Example: I quickly learned that a second bounce off the top of an elevator would probably put me slightly higher than the first – so, like a trampoline player preparing to do somersaults, I’d wait to get the extra high. After that, with a well-timed press of the mantle key, grabbing the gutters of a nearby roof becomes like breathing. With practice, I was able to crouch and summon an elevator in the same sequence of moves, maintaining momentum while dodging enemy fire. Just as importantly, I look cool while I’m doing it.
Even traversing the map ended up being easier, as I funneled every skill point into that old-fashioned elevator over the course of 15 hours. At higher levels, you can summon three elevators in quick succession, enabling you to ascend from one to the other in Mario-style range. Installing a second elevator under you as you dash toward Earth isn’t simple, exactly, but it just makes the elevator combo more satisfying–especially when it’s carrying you and your teammates away from Redfall riverbed and destructive red fog.
Collaboration adds excitement in a number of meaningful ways. First, it gives you an audience that most likely won’t be able to do what you’re doing, and that audience will appreciate when you carve them a new path through Redfall’s rugged terrain. Second, it allows you to combine your abilities. Other characters in Redfall also have traversal tools: Remi’s C4 can take you to higher places; Devinder’s teleporter is basically a teleportation grenade. Working together to grab an out-of-reach ledge is the most rewarding teamwork in the entire game.
However, elevators are also less likely to hide potential, which is best discovered when playing alone. A side quest required me to break into Survivor Bill’s house and retrieve the radio recording. The place is loaded with 3-in-1 laser guns and coated in gasoline, ready to catch fire if I wiggle my toes in the wrong place. Instead of using all my rewiring tools to disable the traps, I wisely deployed the lifts in a few key locations–shooting myself towards the ceiling and carefully skirting the glowing orange beams. Once safely in Bill’s bedroom, I shot at the wandering cultists in the street, sending them stumbling through the explosives downstairs for a delightful, humiliating payoff.
Perhaps an elevator can take us to a higher mode of thinking. In recent years, FPS has been reinvented with traversal mechanics – from Titanfall and Doom to the dynamic movement of Warzone, Deathloop, and Apex. The type has been greatly improved for this. But with manipulation and swiping standardized, developers shouldn’t be afraid to go further with weird, one-off abilities like Layla’s: a chewy, unique skill that will keep you learning and engaging for hours on end. What should I say?the only way is up.
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