.A few friends and I often get into the discussion of what super power we'd love to have. Someone always says flight, someone says super strength and someone always says invincibility. Every now and then though, someone will offer up teleportation, you know like Nightcrawler's BAMF ability, and I'll always counter with the worst case scenario; how do you know you won't teleport directly into a solid object or worse -- a person?

Warp, the new puzzler from Electronic Arts and Trapdoor answers that question, with gory charm to spare. In Warp, your goal is to use an alien's teleportation ability to escape a research facility, and make life a living hell for your captors. It's a game that's full of great ideas -- but those great ideas don't always pan out thanks to mechanical missteps and its frustrating refusal to play by the rules it establishes.

"...a surprising amount of depth in the puzzles..."

It's best to think of Warp as a Pixar movie through the twisted mind of someone like Mike Judge, who isn't afraid to let the gore fly. You play as Zero, a tiny little orange Martian guy who's being tested and experimented on in a remote underwater research facility. As you'd expect, when you escape all hell breaks loose, and the game proper starts. You'll use Zero's teleportation or Warp ability to make your way through the facility. It seems simple, but there's a surprising amount of depth in the puzzles found in Warp, especially those in the latter half of the game.

The real joy of Warp is in just how you utilize Zero's abilities. Sure, you could just go from room to room, but what's the fun in that? In Warp, you have the ability to teleport into certain objects and set traps for your pursuers. There's a few rooms for instance where you'll find barrels filled with oil, you can time it right to hide inside these barrels, attract the attention of a few guards, explode it and watch the fun ensue. You can also Warp into people, exploding them from the inside - -which is a great and gory experience -- at least the first few times.

"...a few problems ruin what would have been a great time."

When Warp works, it works really well, but unfortunately, it doesn't always work, and a few problems ruin what would have been a great time. The key problem is that Warp doesn't always play by its own rules. As you progress through the game, you'll gain new powers, and the ability to pinpoint just where you're teleporting, or so the game says. The game will randomly decide when it wants to teleport you five feet from where you wanted to, and while this may not seem like a big deal, Warp often puts you in situations where you're in close quarters with soldiers and turrets and an extra inch often means death, and death means sitting through that unbearable load time again.

The evenness of the gameplay is always questionable throughout Warp. Sometimes you'll have to use care and sneak around enemies with precise control, but others you can run right under their nose and still get away. It also doesn't help that the camera decides to randomly swing around and the controls feel clunky as hell. I got the feeling, especially later in the game that Warp was doing whatever it could to get me to not enjoy the experience even though I really wanted to -- and that's a terrible thought.

I really wanted to love Warp, and at the beginning -- I did, but as I played through the game, it became evident that it would be a tough sell. It drips with charm and has some great ideas, but it doesn't fully commit to those ideas, and suffers from some mechanical issues. Still, Warp is a puzzler worth looking into, especially if you can look past the missteps.