You need to be a sure shot in Kick & Fennick, though maybe not in the way you're expecting. You see, the unfortunately named hero Kick sports a rifle with enough oomph to propel his entire body high into the air. Not too shabby. He teams up with a flying robot with a wounded tail named Fennick at the onset, and from there, you use your rocket jump to explore a futuristic cityscape instead of conventional jumping. Kick & Fennick is as unique as it is challenging, continually pushing your skills as you overcome the many obstacles.

Loading

Things start out slowly as you’re given a chance to become accustomed to your gun-powered leaps. You can fire your gun twice before needing to land back on solid ground, where you automatically reload. So you have to figure out how to chain shots together without running out of blasting power while you're still hanging in midair. Fire straight down to gain altitude and then form a 45-degree arc to gracefully soar through a slight hole in a wall. Or aim at an upward angle to shoot through an opening below you while the electrical wires are momentarily turned off. It requires a bit of dexterity to line up a perfect shot, but Kick & Fennick makes things easier by slowing down time while you're fiddling with your aim. And then, once you do fire, the action flies back to real-time speed and you see how well your plan worked.

It's not until halfway through the seven-hour adventure that Kick & Fennick hits its stride. The extended tutorials that make up the earliest levels are fun, though rarely demanding, and it’s a relief when they give way to hard-edged challenges that are as difficult as they are varied. One stretch has you navigating bouncing pads, which may sound benign, but becomes downright devious once you realize you have just two shots to propel yourself across a long series of pads laid over a deadly pit. And when you reach the other side, a wall stands before you comprised entirely of more bouncing pads. This is where your geometry training comes in: can you ricochet from the bottom of the wall to the top? Or are you going to helpless fall back to where you began? It takes a bit of trial and error to climb up there, which makes it satisfying when you do succeed.Those roadblocks tie into a couple of the downsides of Kick & Fennick. Figuring out how to pass a particularly nasty stretch can take 10 or more attempts as you calculate the perfect speed, trajectory, and timing needed, but your limited health often won’t allow for such experimentation. Once your life runs out, you must start the level over from the beginning, which can be frustrating considering how tough certain sections can be. Thankfully, there are health orbs scattered about to help stave off death, but they’re in such limited supply that you’re destined to run out regardless if you’re not a pro. The challenge is welcome, but playing the same sections over again to get back to that challenge is anything but.More troubling, I lost my progress more than a dozen times in the course of my playthrough. When I switched to a different game or just went into the Kick & Fennick’s menu, when I came back I’d often find myself one level away from where I should have been. I have no idea why, but I wasn't happy.Still, I kept playing because the puzzles are so imaginative. There's a stretch in which your biggest challenge is coming to terms with the series of zip ramps that lie before you. Navigating those levels at high speeds while you line up you next shot brings some much needed excitement that the more methodical levels lacked. And when it throws teleporters in your way, that's when things get even crazier. With these, you not only need to get the right angle entering the portals, but ensure your speed is spot on as well. Successfully leaping through a sequence of portals (often combined with bounce pads and zip ramps) is hugely rewarding because of the skill and determination it takes to reach the other side in one piece.Each of the five chapters culminates in a boss fight that makes use of the aforementioned props in smart ways. Shoving bosses into games built around puzzle solving can often distract from the inherent pleasure of navigating imaginative locales, but in Kick & Fennick, these battles are some of the highlights. Causing a mechanical spider to crash through the floor made me smile with glee, as did fleeing from a robotic monster upon a series of zip ramps. It's a shame there are only five boss encounters during the course of the adventure, because each one provided a nifty change of pace from the core action.