Intro:
So what happens when you hunt the Gamemaker Community (GMC) forum for a game to review?
Well, you come across 4 types of games:
1.
WIP (Work-in-progress)
[ These are the guys I don’t have
much to comment on:
While some of them are pretty good games on the rise,
others have a lot of room to improve upon]
2.Novice games
[ These are mostly first or
second-time projects.
Actually, most of the novice games are usually in WIP
section, but a small number of them make it to
the ”Finished Games” section.
Now this finished
ones are playable, but usually buggy or
easy projects.
Not really the kind of stuff you’ll like playing.
They are
usually very small in number, and are not continued for sake of better projects.]
3. Intermediate games
[ These are the most in number.
While a lot of them are interesting, they are usually not totally bug-free.
Most popular genres remain RPG, tower defense and platformers.
Many of them are
“just another game” and are not quite polished, but they are usually continued/updated
for a reasonable amount of time.
A few of these games, which have interesting content,
through continuous development, evolve to the next section of games. ]
4.
Jewel Games
[ The rarest kind and the ones
worth waiting for- usually made by GMC veterans and becomes very
popular.
Highly polished games (not in term of graphics, but in term of game design),
usually with quite
innovative gameplay and intelligent level design – the ones
you’ll always be coming back for.
Many of the GMC Jam winners (usually
continued even after the jam ends) fall in this classification.]
The first look:
As this is my first review, I wanted to clarify how I
classify most games in the GMC so that I can refer to the class of game
whenever I review one.
So, let’s come to the
real stuff …..
When I decided to write a game review, I had the lucrative
offer of choosing one of the ( recently ended) GMC Jam 6 games.
But I decided to act otherwise:
I think those games have fair amount of spotlight on them
and so, it will be justified enough to review one of the “not-so-popular” games
from the “Finished Games” section.
I wanted to see how MisuMen49
(the creator of this game) have changed the classical Brick-breaking game. Also the description read “2 years in the
making” – so that kind of interested me.
Frankly, at this moment,
I expected the game to fall into the Elite class of “Jewel games”. So,
let’s see how it fares finally…
The moment you start the game you see a screen shake and
some 3-D boxes thrown at your face followed by the name of the company (or
group, maybe).
This effect does look professional when you run the game for the
first time; but when you come back at it later, you may find it a bit annoying
and long (in duration).
Then, when you
finally start in the “Normal” mode, you get a screen filled with bright, colourful
and outline-based brick arranged in a fashion, as you normally expect it to be.
Those bricks get a lot of your attention due to their sleek and beautiful look.
Now, when you start playing the game, you just wish that you knew each of the
“power-up”s and “power-down”s showing up
on the screen (some of them may look similar).
They are broadly classified into
good and bad category, recognizable from the colour of the bubble around them,
so you don’t get confused.
This is a nice addition to the concept of
“power-up”s, I suppose.
This is how your journey starts in this 100-level game….
To be true, it wasn’t possible to play the whole game, but I
tried my best to get the whole picture and below are my opinion on specific
elements in the game:
Graphics:
This is where this game really rocks!!
Neat attractive sprites and beautiful particle effects gives
a edge to this modern-day version of Brick-breaking game.
I just wish that there were different backgrounds for
different levels.
The background is good enough, but it may get repetitive to
the player.
Also, the “Death screen” (when the player misses a ball) in which
the colours were apparently just reversed, looks like a cheap effect – could
have been done better.
Verdict: A (Very Good)
Gameplay:
Clearly, not the best gameplay I have experienced.
The game is perfectly playable, but there are some problems
under the hood.
These are a few bugs which can make the whole gameplay
experience bitter:
2. The "bat" goes outside the screen:
a) if you move
the mouse hard towards one wall,
b) also at times
with the keyboard.
The frustrating
part is that both of this either kills you directly or freezes your bat, which
is again
( effectively)
going to kill you.
3. In "mouse mode", if your cursor is on
the side brick walls, when you are reborn due to your 2nd or 3rd
life, the new
bat is also created there and so it practically means one more unjustified death.
Verdict: B (Average)
Level Design:
I will be super-cautious about my comments here:
As a whole, this game takes a new take on the old
“Bick-breaking” genre.
I didn’t go through even 50% of the game, so it’s not
justified for me to give a rating here.
But from whatever I experienced, I liked the varying number
of power-ups and attacks and specifically, how they can make a long level, a
lot easy.
Sound:
The sound effects did make the whole experience more
awesome, but the background music was kind of repetitive, so that should be
changed.
The collision sound effects were quite energetic and I loved them.
Also, the sound accompanying the screen shake was pretty
good.
So, in short, whatever sound is present in the game is
lovable, but I expected some more variations for the background music.
Verdict: B+ (Good)
Overall recommendation:
This game is more than worth downloading: definitely a lot better
than average games, but still a “Intermediate level game”.
You are surely going to love the flashy neon graphics, but
watch out from those nasty bugs.
I recommend not using the “Mouse Mode” due to the bug told
earlier.
Finally, I am just hoping that all the problems of this game
gets addressed by MisuMen49
and we have one more perfect game to play.
Verdict:
B+ (Good)
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