Just a wonderful experience. I wish there was more!

Boomeroad is a neat little experiment that came out of Bandai Namco's rookie training program. I assume they were giving it to people who own their other games automatically, cause the first I heard of it was when I found it in my Steam library.

It's pretty much a navigation playground along the lines of those fan-made Sonic engine demos you see every so often. The core mechanic is that you have a boomerang, and throwing it leaves a rail in the air which you can grind on. You can aim and throw the boomerang again mid-air, chaining from rail to rail as long as your gauge lasts. Time all but stops while you're aiming, so you can pull off some pretty cool chains without too much stress.

The goal is to explore two large-ish levels consisting of floating bits of ancient ruins in a skybox, tagging two specific locations then heading to the level end. There's an intended path, but there's nothing stopping you going off it and taking your own route. There's also five collectibles to find in each level, which permanently increase your boomerang gauge when you find them. When you finish both levels, you unlock a Time Attack mode, but that doesn't carry your gauge upgrades across, they're just for playing around and exploring.

Story isn't much to speak of, it's very bare bones. It's more the vague impression of a story than anything. But for what the game is, that's more than enough. Graphically, it looks fine. Everything it wants you to know about is nice and clear. It was a little tricky at first to figure out where my boomerang was going to go from the path preview it gave me, but I got the hang of it fairly quickly.

As far as gameplay goes, yeah! This is good stuff! Simple core idea, surprisingly complex execution. It has that "it makes you FEEL like Spider-man" kind of thing going on. The movement mechanic is powerful, but you have to get to grips with it to make it work for you. Going off the beaten path and soaring around the flying ruins, dodging falling blocks and scaling the tallest buildings looking for collectibles, was a ton of fun while it lasted.

If I have a gripe, other than how short it is, it's that it might be a bit TOO complex for its own good. While grinding a rail, you can lean left and right, speed up, slow down, but rails rarely get long enough for you to even read the control hints, and I have no idea why you'd want to lean or to go any speed other than as fast as possible. At most it adds a slight execution penalty, because holding back on the left stick while aiming curves the boomerang's path downwards, which is often helpful when you're trying to cross horizontal distance, but when you're on the rail you'll want to hold forward ASAP to speed up.

There's also a button to instantly recall the boomerang, which I didn't quite understand how or when to use. The boomerang usually comes back fast enough on its own, and the few times it didn't, I didn't realise it was still in the air until I tried to aim, couldn't, and fell into the abyss. Checkpoints are plentiful and there's no health meter or lives system, so those moments were no big loss, just the tiniest bit of friction.

Overall, I'd recommend trying it! It's short enough to beat three times over in an evening, only about 1GB in size, perhaps most importantly free, and you might well have it in your library already. Why not give it a go?