When the two new consoles were released last year, neither one had a game that could be counted as a system seller. Microsoft pointed to the March 2014 release of Titanfall as the game that would drive sales for the Xbox One which was released in November 2013. However, now that the sales numbers have been released, it is clear that didn’t happen. The Playstation 4 outsold the Xbox One in the month of March and, according to the publisher EA, Titanfall has failed to even sell 1 million units. In my opinion, this happened due to it not being an Xbox exclusive.

Due to Titanfall coming out on Xbox 360 and PC, in addition to Xbox One, there are multiple ways to play without spending the $500 to buy an Xbox One. I believe Microsoft had to agree to avoid exclusivity because Respawn, the developer, didn’t want to sell to such a small install base, reportedly only 5 million units to date. By opening the sales up to PC and the 80 million Xbox 360 owners, the sales of the game would be high enough to make it a success for Respawn. Microsoft did not have much room to negotiate since Respawn is an independent studio. In this arena, Sony has a distinct advantage over Microsoft because they own several first party studios. Sony can determine what system the games will be on and drive hardware sales with them unlike Microsoft.

Microsoft has a severe disadvantage currently because they own so few studios to drive sales. They will have to lower the price on the Xbox One or release a Halo game to drive sales of the console. In my opinion, Halo is really the only property Microsoft owns that is currently in production that could sell Xbox One units. Ironically, the Xbox One is actually selling pretty well. It is selling faster than the Xbox 360 did in the first six months; however, the Playstation 4 is selling historically well also. What this means is console gaming is alive and well and that can only mean great things for gamers going forward.

With the launch of the new consoles, there are a few downloadable games that are available to play outside of the big, tent poll games that are beautiful in their own right. One of these is a game that is available for free on PlayStation Plus called Contrast. It takes place in Paris in the 1920s, where jazz is playing in clubs and magicians are doing shows on the streets. You play as a friend to a little girl trying to help her mother and father through problems, both financially and emotionally. They live in the shadow world and show up throughout the game only in the shadows of light.

Your unique skill is you can transfer between the real world and the 2D shadow world. You have to solve puzzles by passing between the worlds, jumping on shadows to move through the environment. You’ll have to move spotlights around to change the shadows on the wall to solve puzzles. This could have been more flushed out but the second half of the game, it falls back onto moving boxes around to set on switches to open doors. I wish they would have developed the shadow mechanic more and didn’t fall back on moving boxes around. The puzzles feel similar to Portal but aren’t as difficult.

The real downfall I found was the traversal and jumping felt really floaty and imprecise. There were many times were I knew where I wanted to go but had a very hard time getting there due to the way the jumping functioned. I also incurred a few times where I would get stuck on geometry and couldn’t get out without restarting from the last checkpoint. I feel like the developers rushed this out to make the console launches and if they could have had an extra month or two, the game would have the polish it needed.

Over the four hours or so of the story, I did find myself really enjoying the story and the shadow mechanic. I did wish they did more with it and had the extra month to work out the bugs but overall, you can’t beat the experience for the price.

Grade: B-