Recent reviews by Aprillomat

For how small this game is, I expect some amount of polishing and testing. There really isn't much to do for the devs to troubleshoot a game that has so little content, so little to deviate from.
But having bugs that require you to restart the game in order to keep playing because you are randomly (while playing a level) transferred to a level select-screen for a locked level, with no option to return from it (other than closing the game) and then every so often the mouse pointer turning invisible, leaving you to blindly move it around the screen to see which buttons get highlighted *so you can actually confirm the exit rather than having to force quit*, not to mention the fact that it says full controller support, yet it doesn't even react to my controller inputs AT ALL despite every other game I own working flawlessly with that gamepad...

I just feel like the balance is tipped so much in disfavor of this game.

Even though I like the concept. Sure, it could honestly use a bit more background animations to make the rather stale ambience a bit more lively, which would help tire one out less quickly while playing. The music is also rather bland, though not displeasing - I guess it works for this type of gameplay, but is also doing nothing more than that.
And then there are the problems with you sometimes being able to see obstacles too late - all they had to do was make some of them transparent, or less wide at the top, or give them more holes. But like this, you are at the mercy of the RNG not giving you some combination of obstacles that will have you crashing into a wall you could not have seen coming a split second before (even with perfect reflexes, and I have a strong love for excruciating precision games, so long as they are fair and make it easy to see who's fault your death is - ideally, your own, and only your own fault).

With so many cons, I just seem to have to give this a downvote, given that there are so many other (and better) games out there, that have taken care of the bare minimum of troubleshooting and bugfixing to make them playable, while also offering more polish and engaging content for the asking price. Were this free, I'd let it slide, but at 3€, I expect something that doesn't urge me to write a negative review within the first 10 minutes of playing it.

game is ok














buy at full price
give the devs some money
they need it for silksong

If you bought this before the remaster went life, consider yourself lucky.

I had fun playing this game. Yet here's a negative review. So why?

Let me preface this by saying that i enjoy fast paced, unforgiving reaction games, i have upward of 400 hours in geometry dash and 50 hours in super hexagon, and i also enjoy playing audiosurf. So don't give me "it's supposed to be hard!" or "you are just not good enough" comments.

This game is like the uncared-for child of Audiosurf and Super Hexagon.
It's not only unforgiving, it is unfair in a lot of situations. Why? Well, here are some reasons:

• The obstacles are randomly placed, without any measures taken to prevent placement that is unavoidable or unforeseeable. They are usually spaced apart, so you won't have two obstacles next to each other. But here are some bad things:
  
  
  1. the obstacles block the view on other obstacles that may be on the next lane right behind them. Even with superb reflexes, you cannot react if you leave a lane, and the new lane greets you with a pillar to your face. The reason why you cannot react is not that you are not good enough, it is...
     
     
  2. you have a delay when moving, i.e. the animation of you changing lanes must finish before any further inputs are registered. This is irreconcilable with the fact that sometimes, you *need* to move quicker than the game allows you - a complete game breaker.
     
     
  3. sometimes, due to the randomization, you will switch to one side (let's say left), and then there will be a new obstacle directly behind the first one on the new lane, so you go left, immediate new obstacle, left, new obstacle... but so quickly that you need to *spam* left in order to avoid them all. if during a part like this, you get too far to one side, the game hasn't yet rendered the new lanes on that side (there are technically infinite lanes, but only the few around you get rendered). It may well happen that on such an unrendered lane, an obstacle will appear before you, even tho you couldn't see it coming (because it didn't get drawn quickly enough). The lane also doesn't change color in this case, only once the obstacle is there already, and you will almost inevitably crash.
  
  
• the color of the lanes indicates if an obstacle is coming up, and how far away it is - in theory. If this was done properly, it would alleviate the fact that the pillars will sometimes block your view and you can't see what's coming up; however, the color scheme for indicating this is blue -> bright red -> even brighter red/orange -> obstacle. where blue is safe, and the other two mean danger. well, you can't really tell the difference between those, because while bright red and orange are hard to distinguish this quickly already, the game puts a lot of absurdly needless "flashy effect lights" in your face at every minor turn, and there is a lot of ♥♥♥♥ going on all the time that really does not have anything to do with the gameplay. flashing effects disable you from seeing the red lanes, etc, you get the idea.
  
  
• to make the above worse, in the 4th level, the ground is ALSO red! Like, are you serious?
  
  
• lastly, there's the camera movement. If you are moving towards one side too fast, the camera will sort of follow you with a delay, slightly rotating the screen around its former position in the process, before it settles over you again. This is extremely annoying, and will sometimes make it impossible to see what's on one of the adjacent lanes, because they are too far on the side of the screen and perspectively distorted.

other cons include:
a game like this should (imho) focus more on the core gameplay mechanic, which by itself is fine and fun (save for the above). However, this game tries to introduce complexity by adding more "obstacles", like other players that shoot you (it's almost impossible to see the shots sometimes, due to all the effects), and the "lane restrictions", where you can only switch to one side, or need to switch to a specific lane, otherwise your movement gets blocked (you can remove a block by hitting space, but you often don't see the message "blocked" because it's so small and there are flashy effects all around it). Looking out for these things makes the game distracting and stressful, rather than fun.

Let's say something positve:

• soundtrack is nice
  
• the pacing is actually nice, and so is the general perspective that you are playing in.
  
• the game feels fun, and you could get really absorbed in it, except when you die a lot due to unfair events. Once you get a good RNG on a run, you can kind of enter that "Zen mode" you need for these types of reaction games, and everything feels cool for a while (at least until the next time you can't quickly double-tap to switch over 2 lanes because the animation takes so long that your second tap gets ghosted >.<)

I think if the devs made the obstacle placement less random, changed the color palette, added an option to remove flashy lights and fixed the delay on the camera and on movement, then this would be a really awesome game. I would love to give this a thumbs up, but in its current state, it just feels too rushed and unoptimised in terms of design choices and core mechanics.

Verify Low Death! - The T-Shirt.

Not so bad :P
Since the community and Boris hopped on the modding train asap, the look and feel of the game has by now already surpassed most of what Legendary Edition with mods had to offer (although there are still a lot of mods not out for SSE, i think what is there is already pretty neat :P).
It's rather stable, doesn't bug as much when alt-tabbing and the graphics enhancement mods plus ENB plus the remastered vanilla lighting make for a pretty pretty Skyrim, that does look and feel more natural than the Legendary Edition with the same modifications, because a lot of the mods got some vast improvements when they were ported over.

Hair still looks beyond ♥♥♥♥♥♥, but oh well. Above 60Hz you will get a seizure (1.3 beta supposedly fixes this, but we will see).

Overall, it's nice to experience Skyrim all over again, and i'm surprised how active the modding community has been and how much there is already, this early on. Could be a new hit, if this keeps going. Also, the game hasn't crashed for me even once, despite all the mods.

Sucks tho for people who didn't get it free, you'll have to fork over 40$.

music is better than in the remake, and the feeling and overall atmosphere is great. maybe i'm just a bit nostalgic
frankly, i recommend to get both of them, but this one clearly does music better, and the vector graphics on the character make it possible to actually see all the items that are on you.
the rebirth does environments really well though, and i don't mind the combat changes one bit - in fact, in got more varied and interesting. hardmode in this version kicks ass btw, since it's actually a lot harder than normal mode
basically, get this for good music and atmosphere, the other one for more content and better looking environments and more varied combat, and steer clear of both of them if you don't like dying a lot in the beginning

Did you know that there are people who find this harder than geometry dash?
...
Sometimes I don't understand the world.

Well, I'm not really gonna add a whole lot to the review section by writing what 173000 others have written.
It's gud.
Let's hope Bethesda learns something from 2K's ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and doesn't release a port obviously targeted at consoles, with the pc remaster as an afterthought - that said, even if they do, the available mods for the original will still let you experience the stunning graphics that the remaster promises to deliver. still looking forward to it tho :)

great game. very short, and no gameplay, but beautiful, soothing, and with great music.
i kinda expected that ending, but halfway through, i thought they weren't gonna go through with it - oh well.
recommended if you have 5-10 calm minutes, especially for the price.