Whew!
Seems like a lot, right? Well, thankfully the game plays very simply. For most of the game, you dash around as your blue system monitor in a style that very closely mimics Prince of Persia gameplay. Your monitor acrobatically leaps off of structures, runs on walls, and flips about getting from area to area looking to battle different color programs with his light disc. As you view the landscape, you’ll see that most everything is dark an black with various colored highlights, lamps, "health bands," and such that at times act as the progression arrows for you to advance through the stage. Simply look for the blue colored furniture or lines and you’ll get the hang of determining exactly where to run to, leap from, or grab hold. Of course, you’ll find yourself missing the target or leaping off into the wrong direction quite often due to the camera angle or just simply the speed of your character running everywhere in order to pull off his acrobatics. Thankfully, if you jump off a cliff and miss the target, the game quickly resets and "reloads" to the last save point which is typically very close to where you recently died. Lines of fake computer code zip across the screen as a kind of makeshift loading screen as you are reset to the last save position. This infinite lives format kind of decreases the difficulty of this game a lot since you could miss the same jump 20 times in a row and there is no real penalty to failing aside from this save point reset.
When it comes to the mechanics of the light disc combat, the difficulty is almost nil. With very little aiming needed, you simply spend most of the game holding RT (to run and leap off objects) and press the other various buttons for different light disc combos. The more varied the combos and impressive the kill, the more experience your character receives. As you go up levels, you also acquire MegaBytes of space to "upgrade" your character’s performance in the Grid. The upgrades improve the life capacity and special attack energy capacity of your character in the game. They also improves the effectiveness of the various light disc types that you acquire throughout the game. These are the heavy disc, the life draining disc, the explosive disc (my favorite), and the stasis (or slow motion) disc.
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