It’s a Tension update! Reel ‘er in!

Oh my. Looks like work on Tension is going forward at a fair clip. We’ve had mod team Cracked Glass’ slinging and swinging Half-Life 2 total conversion on the site once before, and I should hopefully have a Q&A with them to post at some point in the near future, but before I get to that a very interesting update appeared on ModDB not long ago. Seems they’ve been working on their planned time trial modes – grappling as fast as possible through fiendish arrangements of scattered blocks and walkways floating in the void – and they’ve kindly uploaded a teaser for it.

It looks good, basically. Very good, even. Though… well, me, I like time trials, but I’m really not that good at them so while I have the odd reservation about the level layout we’re seeing here I don’t know how well-founded those would be. Would people just blitz through this in seconds after only a couple of tries? Or would it be too hard? Cracked Glass say none of this is finalised, but at first glance it certainly doesn’t look anything as bad as Mirror’s Edge, where if you’re not doing the three-star, fastest route you’re basically doing it wrong, and if you slip anywhere you may as well give up. Not sure about the grappling hook noise, either! It must be a hard one to get ‘right’, though I can imagine that sound driving me up the wall after extended play. The music’s not my thing (though I can see people liking it), but that doesn’t bother me – it’s what volume sliders were invented for.

Still, overall Tension continues to look really, really promising. It’d be a great shame not to see this one get finished. Head over to ModDB some time and show Cracked Glass a bit of support, eh?

Tension’s page on ModDB can be found here.