Tag: Precision Platformer

[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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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.
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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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