Tag: Platformer

[LEGACY] Shape Shift Shaun Episode 1: Tale of the Transmogrified

When strolling through Keymailer, I often look for games I know I can play. This also means that the selection of games that I get can sometimes be rather underwhelming, or just plain shit.
The ease of getting and reviewing bad games has got me this far, being not just a smaller streamer than most, but also relatively newer to streaming, less professional and less social media savvy.
I can now just about get any game I ask for off Keymailer, assuming that it is indie, and it’s cheap enough made. So, when I saw Shape Shift Shaun, this was another game that I could easily get and play. Plus, it’s easy to make a review for a game when everything is so bad that it sticks out like a broken pinkie.

Shape Shift Shaun Episode 1: Tale of the Transmogrified, is a mouthful to say, SSSE1:TT is also ridiculous and the first gripe I have with the game is the length of the title of the game. Why does that need to be the full title? I get that you probably want to make more games in the future, but it all doesn’t need to be in the title.
Nevertheless, I’ll stop bitching about things that don’t really matter all that much.

Shape Shift Shaun is a game where you get bullied at Hallowe’en after you get a bunch of candy, then thrown down a crater that was made by a falling meteor by the bully. You and the bully are now trapped in the centre of the earth, which is reminiscent of the setup of Journey To The Centre Of The Earth or Ice Age 3: Dawn Of The Dinosaur. Inside this area, the Bully, and Shaun freak out as there’s “no food” despite only being there for like 3 minutes, which is hardly enough time to look around for food. The Bully threatens to eat Shaun’s candy, but the candy has been dropped all over the inner planet. After threatening to then eat Shaun, the Bully then eats a little red Soot Sprite that can talk and transforms into a mega-chad bully and goes on a rampage to eat more of them. Using the power of more little red soot sprites, Shaun turns into a dragon and goes on a quest to capture the Bully.

I have no idea whether this is a game for kids or not.
It’s really hard to tell.
It’s a basic platformer where you can run and jump, and you collect candy for points. You can also change into a red dragon at any time during the game to then glide and breathe fire on the enemies, effectively killing them. You also breathe fire on a multitude of obstacles to get them out of the way and progress with the level.
All the controls, bar a few, seem relatively alright and make sense concerning the global platforming controls. The only thing I didn’t like was the controls for switching forms and attacking enemies. They were close to each other and on a side of the keyboard that didn’t make sense to me. This often led me to change forms when I wanted to attack enemies.

The story itself goes on further than that, hinting towards being able to change into multiple things, but I just didn’t get that far. Despite actually feeling quite fluid and easy to control, the enemy placement and the placement of platforms, on the other hand, had me at a complete loss. Only being able to get close to the end of the level out of memory, makes me think that either it’s not a kids game, or it’s just a bad one.

Pros:

  • The game works, has no massive graphical or audio issues/glitches, and does not crash upon load or during the game.
  • Even though it’s not an old game, it has that old, cheap looking aesthetic of older games with the weird moving 3D character models in a 2D game. I hold this as a positive as it’s not entirely ugly, but certainly holds that old-world charm.
  • Everything is clear and self-explanatory, absolutely no guess-work is required to complete this game. Everything is spelt out clear as day and objectives made clear.
  • Most of the controls are the universal norm for most platformers.

Cons:

  • The story is boring, rather drab and a little ridiculous at best. Clearly overexaggerated for the comedy value. The Bully freaking out the tiny red creature talks then promptly eating it seems a little unusual.
  • The controls that are not the universal norm for platforming are very strange. It essentially has you reaching round the keyboard, but also accidentally smacking the wrong one. Despite being relatively easy otherwise, this part of the controls raises the difficulty immensely for no reason.
  • As the controls for platforming are almost perfect, the game had to fail elsewhere. This is where game design came in. The platforms are arranged so strangely that one small move can have you falling off the edge of a platform, despite the image of the platform still being under your feet. You also have to remember exactly where things are, as you can be jumping off a platform at the far right of your screen not knowing where the next platform is.
    Enemy placement as well is a tragedy. Three long and wide purple blob creatures on a tiny platform that I not only need to land on but also destroy the vines AND kill them and progress.

Price: £5.79
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: 15
Cards: No
Worth The Money: Nah, not really.

In conclusion, I’m still not really even sure whether this game is a kids game or not. It’s genuinely bland enough in the story department but colourful enough and revolves around sweets. It’s also easy to grasp, apart from the odd controls for switching forms and attacking. It’s a really mixed bag in terms of a game, but my audience absolutely hated it, they could’ve hated how it looked more than me. Overall, the game isn’t that bad, it’s just not really worth the money it wants as while it probably has the content and time/effort put into it for a £5.79 game, it’s just not fun.

Zesty Rating
3 Out Of 10
A boring and bland story paired with a colourful but ugly game. Lovely controlling of the platforming and has everything a platformer needs, except for a good game design. Dodgy platforms, terrible map planning and even worse enemy placement.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
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[LEGACY] Alwa’s Legacy

Starting off with the sequel to Alwa’s Awakening, what a joy and what a delight after playing the first game. From their game in 2017 to this release in 2020, Alwa’s Legacy is one of the games that I can say visibly and thoroughly improves from the first game to the second. Nearly every point that I had made about the previous game was cleared up, rectified, and that’s always a great thing to see. As if they’ve cleared up those things that so many complained about, it means they are developers who listen, and therefore, developers to follow and trust in. (Just don’t go AAA, please, I beg.)

Despite being a little late to the party, Alwa’s Awakening was something that disappointed me, it felt like a bundle of broken promises and pandering towards those who fall for nostalgia-bait (like the Star Wars Sequels). Despite all the problems still standing, it was a legitimate game and cared about its matters. It stood the test of time for another game to be made and was still good enough to get a mixed rating.
It was always a surprise for me to pick up both Alwa’s Awakening and Alwa’s Legacy on Keymailer, I had just gone through my entire 2k “maybe-list” (steam wishlist) and had no idea what to expect.
Playing Awakening later had me hesitant to play Legacy, I will admit. I remembered my draining experience (further worsened by playing another bad game beforehand, I will admit.) and put off playing Legacy as long as I could. Now, playing it, I realise how silly it was to just assume that those same aspects that I loathed from the game would carry over.

Because it didn’t.
Hence, why this review will be a comparison.


“Most of the platforming requires pixel perfect jumping. I found the platforming some of the easiest to control out of all the games I’ve received from Keymailer, but it takes the happiness of finally having that away from me when showing me the platforms. Granted, not all the jumps are hazardous, death traps, but the ones that are the furthest away from the checkpoint always are, and it hurt my soul.” ~ (Alwa’s Awakening Review)
My soul has been healed. This game still requires some amount of “pixel perfect jumping”, which I would say most platformers need for it to not just be a walk in the park, but in this sense, all the jumping and platforms made sense. Everything made sense. I didn’t feel as if I needed to lean to the side “IRL” (in real life) to make every jump, it was smooth and nurturing but wasn’t afraid to let you fall if you fucked up. The death traps and such are placed appropriately within great consideration of where your last checkpoint was, nothing too unrealistic at all and very considerate while still making it challenging.

“Speaking of checkpoints, Red Cap Zombie Hunter, eat your heart out because you have NOTHING on the placement of these checkpoints when it comes to distance. The placement overall of the checkpoints is actually fine and is nowhere near the randomness that Red Cap does with their haphazard tornado lightshows, but the distance is actually heart-breaking and forced me to recline in my chair for a few minutes on multiple occasions.”
Red Cap Zombie Hunter…. Bro this is how you do it. It’s not about putting checkpoints, it’s about listening to criticism, taking it on board, and not having a hissy fit because people are finding problems with your game. Legacy took the absolutely atrocious checkpoint spacing of Awakening and improved TENFOLD on it. There was almost a point that I thought there were too many, but after unlocking new dangers I realised that checkpoints were necessary everywhere that they were. The game had become a lot more difficult, but at the same time a lot more achievable without throwing your hands up in rage, and it’s all due to the checkpoint placements.

“So if it wasn’t for the amount of dying I was doing sending me back, I also have to do A LOT of backtracking as well. I know it was very common in most older platformers, but with everything combined I genuinely felt as if I was losing the will to live, passing the same area so many times with nothing to gain from it. I only found out that there were quicker ways of going around things, like hidden walls/doors/ceilings/floors, yet I wasn’t to know as they looked the same as everything else!”
Okay, so apart from the one place that I got completely lost looking for an old woman who was the key to me moving on in the game… Once again, such a big improvement. The maps are the same way, in which you could easily get a bit lost, or a bit turned around looking for the way you need to go, but it’s different! The rooms are a tad smaller, they look better, they matter just a bit more. Not only that, but the way that you traverse the map is a lot different too. Many rooms are “one-way” making you a tad nervous as you can’t get back, but then, boom, you get your little power to summon a cube out of nowhere, and you can get back now! Every room and direction is much more purposeful, with fewer dead ends. You can only wander down a route if you have the right powers to do so. No backtracking because you went the wrong way. I still haven’t found any hidden walls/floors/ceilings/doors but seen as this game was a lot more enjoyable than the last, I might go back to it.

“As if backtracking and losing progress to things wasn’t enough, your character is also very slow in comparison to big empty and expanding rooms with not much filling them but maybe one or two measly enemies which will be super stingy about their drops.”
I’m trying so hard not to write vocalised expressions of satisfaction, just thinking back to the change on just how smooth the character is when walking… Your character is faster, smoother at walking, jumps are more responsive and rooms are not big and empty. Everything is fucking tight and fluid, and it’s lovely. I’m not so mad about enemies being stingy with heart drops because my slow-ass isn’t being grabbed as much any more, I’m not getting bored in a room, I’m not actually getting lost or having to backtrack as much. It’s honestly just “mmmmmmm”, as a change from one game to the other, it’s honestly a great feeling, almost as if I’m gliding with each step. (Not to be mistaken for the character being slippery when walking, the character is very much rooted it’s just the change is that blissful)

It’s honestly a great experience, and not just the game itself, but the rise from complaint ridden game to game I genuinely have only small complaints for.
— I still don’t really know the story, but that also seems unimportant.
— I got lost trying to find the old woman because I didn’t realise I could jump through the big orange column, as it literally looked like a wall.
— I don’t understand if I can swim? Or how to swim? Or if it’s a special power I’m missing.

But besides that, take all my positive comments from the previous game, smack them in this review and add some sparkle.
“The art style is cute and nostalgic with appropriate colour palettes, nothing is ugly or “meh” to look at.”
This, but without my apathetic language. The colours are now popping, and while the style of the game is still very much the same, there have been some tweaks to let things pop so much more and be more attractive to the eye.
“The music fits the purpose. It’s chiptune and 8-bit, and most soundtracks fit the appropriate setting they are put in. Boss battle areas seem to lack a little, but most of the others are great.”
Likewise, the soundtracks are a lot better, but I still have the same gripe about boss battle tunes, sometimes they don’t actually exist at all, which makes me wonder if it’s actually a boss battle, but on the game goes anyway.
“There are NPCs all over the map that all have some sort of dialogue (whether relevant or not) which really brings a bit more life to the otherwise empty feeling game.”
The NPCs are so much more real now, they look better, they have better, more believable dialogue and just genuinely, overall feel so much better. Despite me still not knowing what the fuck is going on within the game, everything reads so much better and has me a lot more invested than what I was with the last game.

“The powers learned by the protagonist within the game (specifically the first one where you summon cubes) were generally surprising to me and a lot more refreshing than the generic powerups most games would give you to get around obstacles.”
Same as above, I don’t think the powers have changed much since the last game (since I didn’t actually get all that far in Awakening) but it’s still such a refreshing premise on superpowers. Replacing your typical double jump with something different that allows you to mostly get the same desired effect.
“Not all enemies are the same one. There are different enemies and also different variations of the same enemies that take more hits to kill. That and the bosses are interesting and while not outstanding or grandiose were still a nice bunch of pixels.”
Oh my god, this, but so much more. Yes, the staple enemy to this game is skeletons, but within the first minutes of this game, it shows you so much more. Hidden behind a door you can’t open, in the first area with the old woman, are so many new creatures. You get hit with skeletons at the start, but later on, there’s flower demons, and evil flowers and moving statues and… It’s just great, and the art style switch I think was also key to making these guys look wonderful too. It gives you such a better grasp early on of how much this world has to offer.

Price: £13.99
Time To Complete: 9 Hours
Achievements: 24
Cards: No
Worth The Money: Maybe. It’s almost always on discount, however, so a definite yes on discount.

Overall, this game is so much better than its predecessor, and it strongly suggests that they listen to their fanbase/community/players. From what I can see in the reviews for this one, compared to the last game, there is so much more positivity towards the game and the developers and a genuine want for a third game. It’s not a game I would play on stream and something I’d pick up in my downtime (if I let such a thing exist) and complete casually in my own time. I recommend, if you have both Awakening and Legacy, play Awakening first just to make yourself love Legacy all that much more.

Zesty Rating
9 Out Of 10.
A remarkable difference from the previous game. Improved in all aspects and actually a joy to play. Smooth characters and amazing game design. Diverse enemies and not frustrating to play, but provides a worthy challenge. Massive improvement.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. 
Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred.
I look forward to writing for you all again.
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Action Rush

So, here we are, in Action Rush. We start at the precipice of a rocky, floating island after just having come out of a very India Jones looking temple-like place. Flaming torches on stone pedestals, huge towering columns and dark shadowy corners. Completely contrasted by the protagonist, the woman, this woman that we are given looks so damn improper that not only am I questioning why I’m here playing this game, but also questioning why this woman is even here.
Apart from that, the next things you see are big floating words on the edge of the cliff saying to follow the path.

Then nothing.

None of the images in this article in any way represent what the game actually looks like. Some aspects are the same, but most of the trailer and screenshots are misleading.

This is the only “tutorial” you get. It doesn’t explain to you that the cards that you collect along the way are unlockable abilities, and it doesn’t explain the little hovering sword things are that you’ve reached a checkpoint which saves your progress. I only found these things out after I went back and got the card after a few times failing the endless jumping puzzle because you NEED the double jump this first card gives you. (Not to mention you can jump while stationary which, as you would expect, makes you do a stationary jump. But use Shift while in air, after jumping stationary, you will start zooming “forward”)

Nevertheless, even from looking at these screenshots provided, they still adhere to the fact that this game is a big CTRL+C, CTRL+V spam.

There is nothing much else to say about this game. The music isn’t dramatic, so it doesn’t provide that necessary feel of a race, and all the assets you jump on being copy-pasted and no variation to it whatsoever, it honestly puts you out of the game.
The second level, however, is a whole new bag of beans with “fall away floors” that don’t work half of the time and no clear guidance as to which way you’re supposed to go. The game generally being a mess, I just decided to not even further progress with it.

That and all the assets are floating mid-air, there was absolutely no effort to make the levels look like believable areas. It’s literally just floating assets.

Pros:
– The game itself from a “distance” looks nice enough.
– The music is equivalent to static noise or ambient song, enjoyable enough for some.
– Asset placement is clean, there are no graphical errors or glitchy looking objects.
– All Controls Work

Cons:
– All assets within the game, no matter how well-placed or how suitable the game looks from a distance, does not make the fact that the game is one big copy-pasta of the same elements. Playing the game for the short amount of time that I did make me see it so quickly. It’s the same asset, over and over again. Even if they’ve managed to make it look different, it’s still the same asset!
– There is no sense of “Race” or urgency, the game literally has the word “Rush” in it yet gives no reason to apart from a timer with too much time on it.
– DESPITE looking fine, the actual hitboxes for the game are particularly bad, and some aren’t even set. Glitching your character through some platforms or just being “false platforms”.
– The woman is super out of place, and dances? With Q and e? It’s so improper and there is honestly no reason for the emotes like dancing.

That, and look at the background. It’s such a cheap attempt at creating a scene, but it actually just stops at the horizon and is nothingness from there.

In conclusion, don’t buy this game. It has no soul whatsoever due to the lack of the effort on the dev’s part to make something more than just a few things you can jump between. It’s so cheap. Insanely cheap, and I’m not making a remark on the price it is, once again it’s the effort.
If you’re super enthusiastic about 3D, 3rd person jumping platformers, go on and play it. I do warn you, you’ll hate yourself for it.
I pray that you’re one of the silly people like myself who already had this in their library due to buying game bundles from sketchy websites. Don’t actually go out and buy this, as buying games like these enables people to think they can make a quick buck from these (un)passion projects. You’re honestly better off playing Cloud Escape.

Price: £2.09
Time To Complete: 36 minutes.
Achievements: 35
Cards: No
Worth The Money: No

(I’ve done it, I’ve found the old image they used to advertise the game, which better encapsulates what this game actually looks like.)


Zesty Rating
1 Out Of 10. You are Snow White, and this is the apple offered to you.
Play any other jumping platformer game instead. By far one of the worst ones yet due to the lack of effort and overabundance of copypasting assets. Not worth your time or your money. No challenge, no love and no soul. Better off playing Diamond Hands: To The Moon.

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[LEGACY] Alwa’s Awakening

This instance for me was a first from Keymailer. What I’d done was go through my entire Steam Wishlist (Over 2k Games, it’s a story for another time) and requested EVERY KEY that I could for all the games on my wishlist. This took mostly the entire night until 4am in the morning, provided that I’d also watched my friend’s stream until midnight that night, and was also being distracted by everything and anything.
Lo and behold, I get not one but two games from the same dev, both being the same franchise and being from as early as 2017.

Alwa’s Awakening is the first of two games, the other being Alwa’s Legacy, which I am yet to play and review, and should promptly be doing it this week. From looks only and the trailer, it looks to be a nostalgic revisit to the old 8-bit platformers coming out nearer the end of the 8-bit era, graphics and movement promising to be an absolute gem and reprise many people’s memories.
I was met with this, but also met with the other thing that happens when I go back and play old games.
“Hmm, something’s not right. Something just feels a little off, like something is missing. It has everything I knew it would have, but why don’t I enjoy it?”
But this isn’t an old game? It’s not something I played in my childhood, yet it comes with that anticipated nostalgia haze, with the emptiness ensuing.

You are this fabled character that’s supposed to save this village/town/city of Alwa. I read the plot and one part said city, but the image was literally like 10 houses, and it threw me off, I think. You go through a mass dungeon crawl where there are enemies everywhere, destructible objects and permanent powerups that unlock more sections of the map for you to explore and conquer.
It gives exactly what’s promised and delivers exactly what’s expected, but why do I feel so let down?

Well, I think after going back to the game after the stream and literally meditating on it, which you’ll never get me to do for anything else, I’ve put my finger on it.
Most of which are things that other games do, but I think the overall combination of these things are what brings it down to a boring, grindy, flavourless halt.
So from here, instead of doing the pros first, here come the cons.

Cons:

  • Most of the platforming requires pixel perfect jumping. I found the platforming some of the easiest to control out of all the games I’ve received from Keymailer, but it takes the happiness of finally having that away from me when showing me the platforms. Granted, not all the jumps are hazardous, death traps, but the ones that are the furthest away from the checkpoint always are, and it hurt my soul.
  • Speaking of checkpoints, Red Cap Zombie Hunter, eat your heart out because you have NOTHING on the placement of these checkpoints when it comes to distance. The overall arrangement of the checkpoints is actually acceptable, and is not as chaotic as the haphazard tornado light show by Red Cap. However, the distance is actually heartbreaking and forced me to recline in my chair on multiple occasions.
  • So if it wasn’t for the amount of dying I was doing sending me back, I also have to do A LOT of backtracking as well. I know it was very common in most older platformers, but with everything combined I genuinely felt as if I was losing the will to live, passing the same area so many times with nothing to gain from it. I only found out that there were quicker ways of going around things, like hidden walls/doors/ceilings/floors, yet I wasn’t to know as they looked the same as everything else!
  • As if backtracking and losing progress on things wasn’t enough, your character is also very slow in comparison to big empty and expanding rooms. With not much filling them but maybe one or two measly enemies which will be super stingy about their drops.

I could probably think of more, but I honestly think that’s enough to rag on the game to make you have a second-hand experience of what happened. I have hope for playing its successor as it too also has a good amount of positive reviews. I’m hoping the next game will have expanded on these Pros I now have to list to keep the review balanced.

Pros:

  • The game works. 💖
  • The art style is cute and nostalgic with appropriate colour palettes, nothing is ugly or “meh” to look at.
  • The music fits the purpose. It’s chiptune and 8-bit, and most soundtracks fit the appropriate setting they are put in. Boss battle areas seem to lack a little, but most of the others are great.
  • There are NPCs all over the map that all have some sort of dialogue (whether relevant or not) which really brings a bit more life to the otherwise empty feeling game.
  • The powers learned by the protagonist within the game (specifically the first one where you summon cubes) were generally surprising to me and a lot more refreshing than the generic powerups most games would give you to get around obstacles.
  • Not all enemies are the same one. There are different enemies and also different variations of the same enemies that take more hits to kill. That and the bosses are interesting and, while not spectacular or grandiose, were still a nice bunch of pixels.

This is honestly a review that I did not want to do. When I look at this game from afar when not having played it, I see what I want. An enjoyable look back on a previous era of gaming, brought back into the modern day, but when played it brings back all the same problems that early day gaming had with it. While £6.99 is a great price for a game with 5 – 10 hours of playtime it’s honestly, mostly filler, retracing your steps, taking the wrong route that leads to nowhere, being punished and not liking it.

Zesty Rating
4 Out Of 10

A great-looking and sounding game, but that’s about it. Has everything about a game from the 1980s including all the unintuitive and punishing game design. Nostalgia-vision encapsulated, leaves you tired, sapped of your enjoyment because it’s not as good as you remember it being, despite never having played it before.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
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[LEGACY] Berserker’s Descent

Keymailer strikes once again with a lovely looking indie game for me to have a look at, and this time, when a game says it’s “hand-drawn” you can just about smell it through the screen.

Berserker’s Descent is a 2D sidescrolling, zone arena-type game. In each instance of the game the map and what you face will be randomly generated as you make your way through, the amount of enemies and the enemies you face will be generated via RNG as well. You make your way through small segments of the level, parkouring and smiting enemies in your way using the variety of attacks you possess, until you reach a combat zone.

Just before this combat zone, the souls you will have picked up along the way and earned via slaughtering your enemies can be used to buy abilities or to heal your character. It’s up to you to spend them wisely before you enter the place of your possible, imminent demise.

From here, you will be limited to the one area while enemies spawn and crawl on from offscreen, multiple attacking you at one time.
Here, you can see where the game really picks up. Using different combos of your varied attacks and keeping the kill combo going, you can rack up lots of souls in a single wave. After going through a number of these arena zones, you’ll eventually be confronted with one of these zones having a boss.
Each zone gets progressively harder with damage modifiers, you get offered more power-ups and things become more expensive.
This game is a roguelike game, however, so your progress does not save, and when you die you are returned to the very start of the game. Your progress is stored on a leaderboard though, which is a nice feature, making the game more repayable with the added competitiveness.

Before moving onto the pros and the cons of this game, I’d like to address the game’s art style.
This game is not the best looking game ever, and in terms of visuals it’s very simple.
A lot of reviews for this game on steam regard this game as ugly or looking unpolished, the latter I can agree somewhat. To say this game is ugly, I think is a bit of a fetch, while this game doesn’t have the most detailed visuals or the nicest artwork, it still serves its purpose in a clear and concise way. It’s overall, a very decent attempt at game artwork and is nothing short of acceptable. If you want an ugly game then might I refer you to Spherecraft, there is absolutely no reason why Spherecraft should exist.

Spherecraft – Minecraft worked because with cubes you don’t have gaps.

Pros:

  • The game fully works, no audio or graphical glitches/errors/bugs.
  • The game has mechanics for both attack and defence, both have many different combos and with the added power-ups and special attack move styles make for really addictive gameplay. Not only do you have to use different keys for different attacks, but also need to use specific keys for directional attacks as well. An addicting challenge to master.
  • The added power-ups pre-zone creates for so many styles of gameplay, leading to character types. While the RNG prevents you from being able to get exactly what you want, you can create similar character builds most of the time, making it really fun to test different methods of approaching bosses.
  • The game has online co-op, I’ve not seen it played nor did I find anyone online that wanted to play it with me, but imagining tackling these bosses and levels together with someone else is definitely interesting, and I would love to feel just how powerful we are with two people.

Cons:

  • The platforming rooms are the weakest part of this game, the character is quite heavy and can land quite quickly after having a floaty jump. Enemies in this area are hard to dodge too, or are just placed in difficult areas for you to hit them from. These resulting rooms feel slow to the rest of the game and contribute to you getting a lower score due to it killing your combo.
  • The hitboxes on some creatures are way off, on others it’s slightly off, while on most it’s fine. It’s one thing that you feel as if you get used to, up until you come across a new enemy type, but there are a lot of times in the game you’re swinging and missing despite the character’s sword visibly swing through the enemy.
  • The early game bosses are punishingly hard. I will admit that if I wasn’t so interested in the game, I may have given up in my first playthrough due to the first boss’ difficulty. It is a learning curve, and it does beat you down, and as much as I can say that it’s part of the game, and it’s to make you step up your game a little in regard to skill, it can be really off-putting to come up again something that hard that soon.
  • I do not consider this a con, but as it’s a con for a lot of others in the steam review section, I’ll pop it here. The game doesn’t look the best. It looks like a game that you wouldn’t look at a second time if you had a quick glance. This is largely to do with the dark, grim and bland colour palette that’s displayed in at least 65% of the game. (I feel as though the colour choice is apt, and the grim, scruffiness of the artwork is charming and fits) The artwork is heavily under-polished, and regarded to as ugly a lot of the time.

Price: £7.19
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: 27
Cards: No
Worth The Money: Not quite. With a decent discount, yes.

Overall, this is a neat little game. While not having a lot to do entirely and everything being down to RNG, it’s set up in a way where it gives a lot of replay-ability due to the permadeath nature of the game, leaderboards and the addicting difficulty of “Maybe if I’d just taken that power-up instead”. The dark theme and design, coupled with the almost bedraggled state of the artwork, create for a dire looking game with the bleakness of your chance at victory with your huge, dull sword.

Zesty Rating
4.5 Out Of 10
A small roguelike game where you run and slice everything in site, referred to as an “ugly” game, but instead in its roughness I see character. Difficult and unforgiving, challenging to it’s core. Could do with some refining in animation and cleaner hitboxes. 

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

KARTOFELKA

Kartofelka is another game that I have no idea how it got into my steam library.
It’s not free and never has been free.
The lowest it’s ever been being £0.39 and still not enough to make me consider buying the game.
Yet, I still have this game in my library, so at one point I asked myself, “what would be the harm in playing it?”

This game appeared in my library on the 14th of August 2019. I do not know what I was thinking when (more than likely in a shady £15 for 150 games bundle) purchasing this, nor do I wish to know what mindset I was in.

Now to make a very obvious statement.
This game is not a masterpiece, nor is it even something you’d want to compare to a masterpiece to improve how the masterpiece looks.
This game is another one of those games that I choose as an example to show people shovelware games, or low-effort games making the indie scene look like it only holds rubbish.

It’s another game to add to your library in the sense that it increases the game count that you have +1.
It’s another game to add to your library as it has achievements. How many achievements you ask? Why… 4999 of course! Four thousand, nine hundred and-fucking-ninety nine. Not 5000 for some bloody reason.

This game is the same as what happens when people think they can just stream on Twitch and get 100 followers a day. Thinking they’ll start making enough money to support themselves within a month of just fanny-ing around on their webcam whilst streaming Fortnite.
The developer of this game threw a platforming game together and created the game to give you 5k achievements. People who are on Steam who value achievements over anything else bought this game at £0.79 just for those.
The developer abandoned the game around 20 days after posting it on Steam and reaping the rewards.

Okay, so, not such a big deal, right?

This was far from the truth, what had actually happened was that there was a huge problem coming from the target audience of the game. Those who bought it primarily for the achievement spam.
The achievements didn’t even work!
Through my personal experience playing the game, these reports were correct (and I was playing this a year after this issue unravelled), when I loaded up the game and the main menu popped up, the achievements started flowing in. However, when I started playing the game, the spam stopped. I thought that maybe it went silent because I was now playing the game, and it went onto a “Do No Disturb” mode.
After about 30 minutes, I checked to see if I’d got all 5k “cheevos”, but I had not. They were broken, as people said.

So, the only two posts by the time I’d bought this game (Aug 2019) were, “HOW TO GET ACHIEVEMENTS” and “Achievements Stuck”.
Considering that the last time that the game was updated was 20 days after the game was released, and that these discussions were made after that, it is reasonable to believe that the developer never addressed this issue.

In fact, in the post that the developer made on how to get achievements, they stated that they cannot fix the game due to having lost the original files for the game and only have the copy that was released.
The fact that they couldn’t fix it was a little weird to me, as they created the game, and being experienced in computer game development myself, wondered why they couldn’t.
Or why they didn’t bother.

One person in the comments of this discussion made a very valid point, however.
“If the achievements aren’t working as intended, and the way to get them is to not play the game and idle the main screen for 3 hours, then take the achievements off.”
This, of course, never happened.
It was the main selling point for this game.
And it’s continued to have sales, and discounts to encourage people to buy this broken game for it’s broken achievements.

Despite it being broken, and the developer acknowledging this, they refused to take the false promise of 5k achievements off the game as it was still bringing in money. Game-stats.com estimating that it’s brought in a net revenue that exceeds the cost of putting a game on Steam.

So, that was the tea about the game.
Is there a lot to say about the game itself, besides the broken achievements?

  • Painful music that loops for every level. It sounds okay at first, maybe a bit elevator music-esque. About halfway through the loop, it sounds as if their cat decided to wreck the entire music production, jumping on everything and clawing at it.
    I’m in no way music professional, but I had to mute the game as it was setting me off sensory-wise.
  • The best jumping mechanics (sarcasm). If you are right beside what you want to jump onto, it won’t do it. It’s almost like there’s an invisible ledge preventing you from obtaining your goals, like a glass ceiling.
    Instead, it accurately represents what fat folk, like me, need to do to even get over a small fence, get a running start. Basically, you need to go backwards to go forwards+up. Oh, and jump is shift, so forget about opening Steam Overlay the default way.
  • The best glitches. There are moving platforms in this game. It makes the case for the best bugs. Basically, when you miss jumping onto the moving platforms (and you will) you will get stuck inside the platform. Not only that, but when you are on top of the platform, your sprite will float mid-air at the peak of the moving platform’s vector.

None of these are game breaking, but are incredibly frustrating from not only a player’s standpoint, but a game maker’s as well.
Just a warning, though, don’t press the Esc key. If there’s a pause, Esc is not the pause key. You will lose all your progress and have to start again. But hey, more fun for you, you get to play it twice!

Price: £0.79
Time To Complete: 1 Hour (3 Hours Idle on Main Screen if you actually want the achievements)
Achievements: 4999
Cards: No, thank goodness.
Worth The Money: It’s not even worth being free.

Zest Rating
2 Out Of 10. Infuriatingly Bland
An “OK” looking platformer, thrown together to make a quick buck out of people seeking to artificially fill out their Steam Achievement hoarding problem. Sloppy coding, hitboxes, and horrible music aren’t the least of your worries when the 5 Thousand Achievements don’t work either.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
0

[LEGACY] Chibi Girl VS Evil Zombie Dead

Surprisingly, this game was not one of those given to me by Keymailer, nor was it one that was sitting around in my Steam account for a thousand years.
Through having a Steam Curator and actually making reviews, myself, on games for longer than I’d known the person I’d previously made review articles for their site, I’ve received games before. This does not mean it’s been at all successful, or I’ve been popular to be given games to. Chibi Girl VS Evil Zombie Dead is the second game I’ve ever been given via the Steam Curator Connect, and was given to me on the 29th of November last year.
(The other one called, Zibbs – Alien Survival, was given to me on 22nd October 2020, and I still haven’t reviewed it yet for reasons, but will actually be doing eventually.)

I’d initially asked my previous reviewing partner if they’d like to review this game (as I essentially shared their reviewing website, they had an equal share of my Steam curator). They probably took one look at it, saying “uhh no, you have it.”. I more than likely promptly laughed afterwards expecting that response and said “Fuck it, it’s a game. It’s not really much of a waste of time.” Accepted, downloaded it and played it about 2 months after receiving it, punctual, I know.

Chibi Girl VS Evil Zombie Dead is an adventure platformer game where you, an unnamed, un-aged little girl is travelling across the zombie apocalypse ridden city in an effort to find her mother because “waaah where’s my mummy?”
Despite being a child, the main character makes the slightly more logical decision of travelling across the city to find her mother instead of breaking down into floods of tears. Or even screaming and crying for her mummy like any other child would, getting eaten in the process.

She travels through a sort of semi-industrial in-construction downtown area, the introduction area showing you that you can drop boxes on zombies, jump over things and control elevators.
Most of the rest of the game is JUST this, which is not inherently bad. There are a bunch of different environments, such as an actual construction site and a sewer level (because god forbid any zombie game avoid having sewer levels). The game does not get more complex in terms of what you need to do to progress. It does, ultimately, use the same factors to make the game progressively more difficult by stacking them on top of each other or making the puzzle a tad more maze-like, making you think about each situation a bit more.

As said before, there’s not much more to this game, and the only thing that drove me to almost complete it was the fact that it was seemingly easily done. Down to its simplicity, it was and is (up to a particular point where it seems it’s physically impossible by the game’s standards to pass it.) easy enough to finish. The graphics themselves were cute enough in a very amateur way, and the puzzles and things were simple enough but also challenging enough to keep me in it. A few times I did debate throwing up my hands and declaring the game broken, but that was all down to a few things that are actually easily fixed.

Pros:

  • The game has no game breaking bugs or flaws with audio.
  • It’s a simple side-scrolling platformer that’s easy enough to understand, but still provides an element of challenge for the player with it’s limited functions.
  • While the entire game is just platforming, between stages there are mini-games where it turns from a 2D platformer into a few different types of games, switching the flow and maintaining interest.
  • Depending on how much of an “out-of-the-box” thinker you are, it is possible to complete some puzzles a few different ways, which in my opinion makes it that tad bit better.
  • The goal of the protagonist is easy to follow, and what little story the game has is sensible and doesn’t take itself too far with being ridiculous. There are a few things that seem a bit out of the ordinary, but nothing too huge.
  • One of the few games I’m actually okay with the protagonist being unable to swim.

Cons:

  • The major thing with this game that almost had me quit the game was issues with graphics vs hitboxes. A lot of the time, my character would fail to jump at a gap and fall into the fire below. This was due to the hitbox of the ledge being shorter than that of the actual image. My character, while still being on the ledge, visibly was not on the code version of the ledge and would fall through the graphic. This wasn’t a major issue all the way through the game, but led to a few moments that almost stopped the playthrough.
  • There’s only one type of zombie. It’s a bit of a reach of a complaint, but there is no visual variety between any game’s zombies per level. All had the same ruined appearance, no sludge for the sewer zombies and no high vis jackets for the construction zombies. The variation between backdrops was great, but lacked at the forefront of the game.
  • The mini-games were necessary. If there had not been the mini-games, then I would’ve stopped playing the game a lot sooner. Other than the shift change between side-scrolling platforming, there is no other pull to this game apart from the fact I “knew” I could beat it and I enjoy platformers.
  • Another graphical bug that I only experienced a few times with the boxes. When you’re pushing a box, it can sometimes get stuck, on nothing whatsoever. It was prominent in one particular puzzle where you had to move a box to a puddle that was electrified by stray wires, jump on the box and jump over the puddle. That was my first initial thought, but the box stopped randomly, and I could not push it any further. Me thinking in “game logic” I determined that “you may not use the box in this area and must figure out another way around this puzzle”. After attempting another couple of ways, I tried the same way again and the box magically moved further this time, to my disgruntlement.

Price: £7.19
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: 4
Cards: None
Worth The Money: No, only buy at a large discount. 65% or higher.

Overall, this game is actually kind of cute and semi-competent. A little simplistic, and it’s only redeeming features are the mini-game breaks between scenes and the way that it reuses the same mechanics in actually interesting ways to create new puzzles. It can sometimes feel a bit repetitive and broken, but I honestly never expected it to be as good as it was, to only have those flaws. It’s still not worth the price presented as, while the mini-games are great for what they are, the platformer doesn’t have a lot of content to warrant the price.

Zesty Rating
4.5 Out Of 10
Cute and simple platformer with other elements mixed through. Competent enough to hold its own, but not enough to hold it together. A little buggy, a little overpriced, and the only thing keeping me interested is the mini-games. How does this little girl know how to drive a car and a boat?

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changed to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. 
Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred.
I look forward to writing for you all again.

I'm still hoping that the dev of this game is doing alright, they're one of the few that took a positive influence from the review. Once again, if you're still around, I look forward to what you have planned for the future. 

…

Boobie Shaker? [How Do I Verbally Facepalm?]
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[LEGACY] Super Clown: Lost Diamonds

Keymailer, as much as you save me from having to pay for the trash that consumes Steam’s indie section, you could not save me from this.

Super Clown: Lost Diamonds was another one of those, “Ah, that will be super easy to play, looks like it has a low skill requirement and made with leftover unity assets from a dodgy car-boot sale.” While being one hundred percent correct in that matter, it did not matter.
What is the use of a game if you cannot play it?

As I load up the game, I’m met with a massive spike in GPU in only the menu screen, this continues on through the entire game, but within the loading screen of all things. This should not be something that happens.
Through most of my time gaming, I’ve only every experienced issues like this with indie games. The first of which being AffordaGolf Online, my first-ever shit indie game that brought up this issue.
My computer specs are as follows:
ASUS ROG Strix G15DK Ryzen 7 5800X

  • Processor: AMD Ryzen™ 7-5800X
  • Installed RAM Size: 8GB DDR4 SO-DIMM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX3070
  • Storage: SSD – 256GB, HDD 2TB

Why is this relevant?
Well on Steam, it so nicely shows the required specs of your PC to be able to handle said game. For AffordaGolf Online, it seemed as though I was going to swimmingly breeze through the game and have no problems with my GPU whatsoever.

AffordaGolf

But no! AffordaGolf drags my GPU through the dirt and slaps it across the face, and with no option to turn any graphics up nor down, it fucked the rest of my stream for the day.
Why, when I have four times the RAM required for indie games, does it shit itself so hard?

Fast-forward a lot of time to my first-ever reviews, grabbing indie games from Keymailer and just taking what I can get. JRPGs, platformers, side scrollers… Anything I can get my hands on that I won’t experience motion sickness playing, give me it all because I want it all.
I came across a game called Rent’s Due: The Game (wow great name, where’d you find that?), and I ran into the same issue. Despite having over both the minimum and the recommended “everything” I am still suffering greatly for playing this game. Dragging my PC through the swamp like a horse for it to eventually sink into the mud as I cry over the sinkhole. Why? Why does this keep happening to me? Why is it only these indie games? And specifically the ones that I either can’t change the settings on or when I do “change the settings” it looks like it does fuck all?

Minimum and Recommended For Rent’s Due (Why is it so high tho lmao)

It became apparent to me after loading up Super Clown, that these indie games all have a few things in common, some of which I listed above.
The lack of having an option to change the graphical settings, or when you do change the graphical settings, it seems not to have any effect.
Another thing however that one of my chatters pointed out to me at the time was the possibility of the game being fully rendered, all at the one time behind the menu-page, not having the levels in a separate instance. When you load up these games, you’re running it all, all the game, all at the same time, even if you can’t see it.
All of these games feature the same visual elements too, either low-poly or cheap looking assets. All with such shiny, shiny surfaces, with Play-Doh features and garishly bright colours and conflict with each other.

Unreal Engine.
Unreal Engine is what these games have in common, and to a lesser extent, Unity as well. While giving people an easy way to make games and making it so “anything is possible!” and give everyone the keys to making games. I much have to agree with Ego when he argues with Guesteu that not just “Anyone Can Cook.”, in Ratatouille. He does continue to go on about how “…a great artist can come from anywhere…” and something about it being much more moving and recognisable if the artist has come from “humble beginnings” which is certainly true. It’s something, a lot of us who play indie games want, that’s why Stardew Valley and Unturned were such huge hitters.
What we get landed with is mostly anything but that!
We get people selling the first-ever game that they’ve attempted to make for £10+, when it barely works and hasn’t been play-tested enough by other people (Red Cap Zombie Hunter). It’s genuinely something that needs to be worked on a lot more before it can be worth any kind of money.
We get people who know how to cheat the system, and will churn out games that have no effort in them whatsoever. Even turning to stealing assets and claiming them as their own, or taking template or sample games, not altering them and selling them as is! (Abscond)

Do you want to know what you see in the images I’ve used for this review?
You see what the developer wants you to see.
Of course, that’s what you always experience when you look at screenshots from a computer game on any platform. However, sometimes, heinous things can be hidden behind screenshots taken at a perfect angle.

When you’re looking at your lovely, smooth game that functions really well, what you want to do when putting your game on Steam is to take the best screenshots that highlight the most stunning parts of your game. The most important features or the most awe-inspiring shots that will make people say “Take my fucking money”.

When you’re adding a game to Steam, you NEED screenshots; otherwise it doesn’t let you post your game (as far as I’m aware). The developer for Super Clown needed screenshots, and as you can see already, the scenes look “okay”, they look “alright”, some are a bit “what the fuck is happening with the shading with those hills?” but it’s reasonable. This is because the rest of the game is such an empty shell. If you spin the camera around from any angle you can see the edge of the game, where the landscape falls off the map, where the ground has randomly been raised and haphazardly spray-painted the terrain. The water looks so out of sorts, appearing to be “super-duper-high def water” with the rest of the map looking like it was made from Magic Sand.

In the first-ever level of this game, you spawn on this plateau where there are at least TWELVE help signs that tell you what to do, or how to do things. For each one, you need to press the interact button but THEN click on the exit window. This is while the world is NOT paused, and you can be attacked by little COVID-19 spores that were placed very close to your character.
Upon dying, you respawn, but the enemy positioning hasn’t reset, and they are right where they were before you died.
On a tutorial level, I’m immediately thrown into a really shitty situation and with no reason for it.
Random coins with weird placements that are probably to teach you what things are, with no way off the big rock other than to make a HUGE jump into the water below. This water being so shallow that I may as well belly-flop and get it over with.
Now, in the Ultra High Def Water, and the inability to change ANY settings, my PC starts levitating with the amount of work it’s having to do and with the fear for my life I “nope” out of the game.

System Requirements For Super Clown

Above all else, reiterating the fact that indie games, of all games, should not be making my computer sound as if it smokes 60 a day. I have 7 Days 2 Die, and it has a lot bigger requirements and only makes my PC sound as if it has a tickly cough on the odd occasion. There is absolutely no need for this.
There will be no pros and cons list because only the cons really matter when the vast majority of people will struggle to load this game up and play it, despite meeting the criteria.

Price: £1.69
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: 72
Cards: No
Worth The Money: Even with it being on sale for £0.40, I would STILL not recommend this to anyone.

Overall…
Yeah, just don’t bother. You probably wouldn’t be able to make it function anyway.

Zesty Rating
0 Out Of 10.
A game that looked bearable, easy enough to play, and made with leftover assets. Broken, unpolished, and lack of quality settings for shaders had my gaming PC wheezing like it was winded. Avoid.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changed to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. 
Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred.
I look forward to writing for you all again.

NOTE: This game is flagged as “Retry”. Due to my PC being professionally cleaned recently, I'm choosing to give most games in which I have these “Computer sounds like it's dying from the flu” complaints another go, or at least another boot up on my freshness. Bearing in mind, these games were played extremely early on in my reviewing “career” meaning my PC should've been 100% sound to play these games regardless.
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