Πρόσφατες κριτικές από τον constantcompile

Normally if I'm on the fence about <2 hour games, I tend to give a thumbs-up; after all, you can always refund it if you don't feel it was worth the price, right?

I'm not on the fence about this game. The controls are among the worst I've had the displeasure of experiencing, and the puzzles are mediocre at best. It's currently on sale for $0.79 (I would be absolutely livid if I had paid full price for this) so you don't have much to lose, but there are much better ways to spend an hour of your time.

A bite-sized puzzle game that I completed in about an hour.

YMMV but I liked it. Recommended.

Simmiland is a charming, simple "god game" that includes a deckbuilding element. It's definitely rough around the edges, and you should expect that going in. Leave the wind cards for last as they tend to be the least useful, and be very aware that the construction of a church - which happens at 1000 faith unless the humans are sufficiently skeptic - will put a hard cap of 120 on IQ, which eliminates your chances of researching high-level technologies.

Still, this is a well-done and innovative game, and I hope Sokpop puts more titles onto Steam like this one. Recommended.

A charming, funny Katamari-like.

You're more or less guaranteed to have fun playing this game through the first time, and grabbing all of the post-game achievements doesn't take long (I did it in about half an hour). There are a few rough edges here and there - I noticed that certain objects would "pop" into the physics grid only after the camera was finished moving - but this doesn't significantly detract from the overall experience.

Most of the thumbs-down reviews for this game mention the ratio of price to gameplay-hours. Given that nearly all of the reviews currently mention a full playthrough taking two-ish hours, I hope the runtime isn't coming as a surprise to anyone at this point. Decide for yourself what two hours of quality start-to-end indie goodness is worth to you, and grab it when it's on sale if necessary. By 1 hour and 50 minutes in, if you truly feel you haven't gotten your money's worth, you can always put in a ticket for a refund.

FWIW, though, I found this to be a great bite-sized bit of indie fun that doesn't overstay its welcome. Recommended.

It pains me to give this a thumbs-down. If you pick this up for a dollar, play through to the last level and then set it down, you'll have had a wholesome gaming experience. But if you play for longer than that, the cracks will start to show.

I'll start with a fairly minor one - the people you rescue offer absolutely no in-game benefit beyond a flat score bonus (which matters only to leaderboard runners) and earning the "star" for rescuing all of them at each difficulty level. This unfortunately makes them irrelevant for the majority of your runs. It would have been nice for them to grant something - a health boost or a firepower boost - but sadly, rescuing them usually only introduces unnecessary risk. The "VIPs" and "friends list" rescues are also simply a chore to work through.

There are other issues as well - several of the enemies seem to function as little more than "gear-check" bullet sponges that you have no hope of destroying completely without the prerequisite upgrades and/or powerups. This incentivizes you to grind currency in the mid-game, which isn't much fun.

The biggest flaw by far, though, is that the spawn rate for cards is way too low. By the time I finished the star-based upgrades to my craft, I only had about half of the cards - several hours later, I'm still only at three-quarters. These cards each have significant effects that are a huge help in the early game, but by the time you actually unlock them, the added benefit is usually marginal at best.

All in all, there's a lot to like here, but there are too many significant flaws for me to give it a thumbs-up.

Not recommended.

There are SO MANY things about Pac-Man 256 that I like, it really pains me to give it a thumbs-down. I like the semi-random nature of the procedural infinite maze creation. The speed at which the glitch chases you feels perfect. The Ghosts' behavior is well-crafted and engaging. And throughout the game, you have this motif of the binary number system, which extends to the title, the combo system, and the powerup system.

This motif extends to virtually every part of the game except one: The virtual currency that was carried over from the mobile version.

There are 21 powerups in the game, and each can be upgraded to be objectively better up to 8 times. The first "level," where you unlock the powerup, costs 16 coins, and it doubles at each level until it reaches 2048 coins. That's 73,440 coins total. The value of coins that you pick up is insultingly low; it was originally 1 for a yellow coin and 5 for a red (breaking the binary motif, argh) but this was seen as too low, so increased to... wait for it... 4 for yellow and 10 for red. This is still insultingly low. You do unlock "coin packs" either for beating missions or at random time intervals, but these range from 128-1024 coins and - in my experience - are usually 128 coins.

The value of the powerups is such that you cannot ignore this coin system. This means there will be times where you've got a good combo going, but you see two red coins near a dead-end of dots and think "sigh... fine." The disproportionate numbers involved means that progress feels slow and tedious. This was a completely unforced error.

Here are just a few ways the developer could have addressed this:

• Increase the coin value much further to 8 for yellow and 32 for red, in keeping with the binary motif
  
• Halve the upgrade number requirements; have 8 coins for level 1 and 1024 for level 8
  
• Make the progression system entirely dot-based, banking dots instead of coins

The first two would be trivial to implement; the last one would be more complex but would make for a vastly superior game overall. What really burns me about it is that I know the coin system was put in place to incentivize mobile users to buy coin packs, and that I - as a paying customer! - am now having to deal with the grind deliberately programmed into the process.

Again, I like so many things about this game. If you intend to play it for less than 4 hours or so and then put it down, you'll probably get your moneys' worth of enjoyment. But the longer you play it, the more irritating this totally unnecessary carryover element of virtual currency becomes.

Not recommended.

I feel there's a growing awareness that many auters turn to videogames, when their aspirations for Hollywood don't pan out. Overly-long cutscenes and gorgeous visuals are increasingly paired with substandard gameplay, sometimes boiling down to outright QTEs. Discussions about this trend mainly take place in the AA to AAA space - some cheeky video editors make whole "films" out of the several hours' worth of cutscenes in a single game, and snarky commenters ask "At this point, why not just make a movie?"

Small indie point-and-click games are generally given a pass; it's understood that the hand-drawn environments and animations in games like Machinarium and Samorost could never be scaled-up to make full film productions. But I think the defining trait of Lumino City - the single fact behind its critical reception and awards, its middling metacritic score, and the thumbs-down I'm giving it now - is that this really could have been a feature film. In fact, I think it should have been.

How many of the BAFTA and IGF and GC judges have actually played this game? All the way through, with no guides or hints? The screenshot quotes nearly all discuss the visuals, the scenes and the "craftsmanship" behind them - one quote is even a reaction to the trailer.

The trailer!

Let me tell you, I'll cop to the fact that I'm not a big fan of point-and-clicks, but the actual gameplay of this game is aggressively bad. You spend most of your time with a very vague goal, having no idea how the actions you're undertaking are bringing you closer to accomplishing it. The visuals are very pretty, but do an absolutely terrible job of actually relaying useful information. More than once, the area I needed to click on to proceed was so nondescript and so small that even clicking randomly on the screen couldn't get me un-stuck - I had to consult a video guide to find out what I was meant to be doing.

And the developer knows this. At some points in the game it's clear they've thrown their hands in the air and said "I'll just put a circle in this case showing where you're supposed to click!" NO. THAT WAS YOUR CUE TO PROVIDE AN OPTION TO HIGHLIGHT ALL CLICKABLE OBJECTS. Ad-hoc solutions to the worst offenders doesn't make your game better, it makes the visibility of the rest of your game's problems worse.

These half-measures don't only extend to finding clickable areas - they apply to the puzzles, too. I had no idea the 500-page "hand book" was anything more than a concept sketch portfolio, and judging by the other reviews, I am far from alone. Don't get me wrong - some of the puzzles in this game are quite good. But the bad ones are really bad. At less than 15 minutes into the game I encountered a problem that seemed outright unsolvable. I discovered upon consulting a guide that I was approaching the problem correctly, but buggy behavior on the game's part meant that I had to execute the correct step several times in a row before it would actually "stick." The animations were notably buggy in several areas as well.

I could go on, but here's my point: This is the first game I've ever played that genuinely made me wish I was watching a Let's Play, rather than holding the controller myself. The visuals are that good and the gameplay is that bad. I wanted to see the game, but I no longer wanted to play the game. And that is just sad.

Obviously my thumbs-down review is equivalent to spitting in the ocean, since this game has already won its awards and sold its copies. But I think the developer should have taken a 20-minute demo reel, shopped it around to online services like Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix, secured funding for production and VO, and just ran with it as a full animated feature.

Because in my opinion, the gameplay is by far the worst part of this game. This is the first indie game, I feel, to earn that question of, "At this point, why not just make a movie?" Obviously, being the first in that area will earn its creator no small number of accolades from judges who may or may not ever need to actually play through the thing. But I'm not judging a movie, I'm judging a videogame. And I wasn't impressed by my play through.

Not recommended.

• Well-done visual art? Check.
  
• Music that is well-done yet short-lived? Check.
  
• Inevitably makes you wish that clickable areas were highlighted? Check.
  
• Makes no friggin' sense? Check.

Tiny Echo is a semi-nonlinear point-and-click that forgoes the usual inventory system of its peers. You might think, "But point-and-click games aren't very heavy on mechanics as it is; wouldn't removing a system result in bare-bones gameplay?"

Yes. Yes it would. Yes it does.

The ONLY reason I am not giving this a thumbs-down is that I completed it in just one-and-a-half hours, and I suspect you can as well. I really don't recommend paying more than a couple of dollars for this title, but even if you do, if you feel ripped-off by the end you can always refund it.

I generally am not a fan of point-and-clicks and this game is no exception (it was a gift). But the art and music is good and it never crosses into the realm of being bad, so... eh. Unenthusiatic recommendation for fans of the genre.

Back to Bed is a perfect example of a well-done, small-scale indie game:

• The asthetic is consistent, original and interesting.
  
• It's long enough to feel worth the money (especially on sale) but doesn't overstay its welcome.
  
• It offers post-game challenges that require focus without being punishing.

The M.C. Escher-esque dreamscape is quite visually appealing, and the wonky geometry features rarely enough that it doesn't lose its novelty.

Some levels require fairly fast and precise movements, which may frustrate players unfamiliar with videogames, and the control scheme is built with a controller in mind, which may irritate some KB+M players. Aside from those caveats, though, this game is nearly flawless.

Recommended.

Platformer in reverse. Fine. But there are two unforced errors that I'd like to point out here:

• The medal system. Ostensibly, in order to get a gold medal, you have to complete a level on "the first try." What it actually means is that every time you die, INSTEAD of pressing the Restart button, you navigate back to the level menu and select the level from there. So the actual requirement for gold medals is that your restarts must involve extra steps.
  
• Every single mushroom MUST be jumped on, including those where it's not clear whether it would have been necessary to jump on it moving forward. The fact that the levels make no sense in "non-reverse" has already been pointed out, but this is the worst example of that.

The fixed movement speed means that each level is less of a "platformer" and more of a series of unimpressive Quick-Time Events. The dialogue and story aren't impressive, either.

Skip this one. Not recommended.