Recent reviews by shrewdlogarithm

There's an interesting concept here but it's buried without trace in a nightmarish UI and under a tonne of fx which literally make your eyes hurt.

It might help if the game gave new players a few clues what to do - it desperately needs some balancing because there are clear-and-easy ways to 'win' - it's a bit of a dog's breakfast, really.

It's hard to recommend as-is

I've owned Fractal since it was a standalone Flash game (it's since been redone in Unity) - I like the concept and I've played a fair-bit but there are some gotchas with the game as-a-whole which make it hard to recommend to others.

First-up, the game has power-ups which are not explained in any way. You're simply expected to guess what they do!? You shouldn't have to ask in the forums to find-out how a game works!?

The career mode seems designed to teach you how to play (once you figure out the power-ups) and it works upto a point, but by Level 23/24 it's descended into a horrible potluck mess of a thing. Level 24 is, imo, impossible 99% of the time - you need a very lucky layout to be able to clear it (23 isn't much better)

The game is also missing some basic features such as the ability to adjust music/sfx levels and any sort of online highscoring - this seems odd in an otherwise polished product when schoolboy designed games have this stuff?

It's all a bit disappointing really - I struggle to recommend it but I emphasise the the game at the core is a fine puzzle, it's just let down by a feeling of being half-baked and abandoned.

Whilst this is clearly a 'first game made in Unity' it's got ambitions way beyond the usual tutorial and slapped-down assets we've been seeing of late.

That said it is EONS away from being a commercial-quality/ready-for-the-public game. There's loads of stuff going-on, most of which is poorly explained and what IS explained is arguably even more obscure. It's glitchy and clunky and every single model clips through every single other model and effects fire randomly and moving stuff around inventory/quickbars is almost entirely potluck based (equipping things has an RNG!!) and so much more...

Props to whoever put this thing together - no lack of ambition shown, but it's NOT a game ready to be sold to people by any means...

I picked-this-up because of it's promise of a touchscreen experience - but if I'm honest, the touch controls are DIRE.

That you CAN control it via a touchscreen I've no doubt, but there is FAR too much going on to make those controls the ideal choice - they work, that's about it.

Swapping to a controller reveals a more interesting game - it certainly has the Halo feel of needing to choose the best weapons/conserve ammo etc. - it's maybe a BIT slow to get going but it's fine in most other respects.

So recommended IF you've not relying on the touchscreen thing because - frankly - that just isn't fun at all.

I actually enjoyed this more than Castle Crashers - mostly because I spent a fair bit of time playing solo and this seems to cater for that a BIT better than CC does.

It's not a deep and complex game, you could probably spam X from start-to-end if you wished (using combos will make things more interesting for sure tho!) but as side-scrolling beat-em-ups go, it's fine.

You can juggle enemies, stunlock enemies, stack-up enemies and then stun and juggle them - 99X combos are not hard to do etc. etc.

There's challenge modes for every level - a reasonable amount of loot, the classes are maybe a BIT samey (but in a co-op game you maybe don't want big class variations?), environments can hide loot (not sure if good or bad thing?)

At the bargain-bin price I paid I have no real complaints (it was a minor pain getting it to run 1080p but otherwise!!)

Firstly, I love DS and DS2 - they are a fantastic blend of exploration, puzzle solving and hitting things with MASSIVE weapons!

The Deathinitive Edition of DS2 is a tricker thing to rate - the visuals are improved and the DLC has been blended into the game better, but that comes with a performance penalty in a game which wasn't the best performing title at the best of times...

My PC could run DS2 at 60fps (mostly) if I disabled SSAO. The Deathinitive Edition manages more like 45fps with the same settings - it's perfectly playable but it's not ideal.

Hopefully they'll iron-out some of the wrinkles with patches but it's not unplayable by any means and the core game remains excellent IF you have the horsepower to play it.

A short, heavy-on-the-angsty-dialog and fourth-wall breaking platform puzzle which is definately worth a look.

The controls are razor-sharp, the puzzles are never too-taxing (but not always amazingly obvious) - I did lose-focus on the dialogue after a while but I enjoyed it so...

Recommended!

Continuing a series of games knocked-up in Unity from a basic "how to make a character jump" tutorial and then "inspired" by Super Meat Boy and given a "hip" name to disguise it's utter lack of originality (or commercial viability)

2 points if I may...

1 - Namechecking Super Meat Boy "because your game is hard" only works if it's "hard but fair always feels like deaths are your fault" and not just "hard because the controls are crap and you don't explain anything"

2 - Namechecking "Free Flash Games" is ironic given they were free and generally better than this - which costs money and so - erm...

Honestly...

This starts-off really well but it quickly starts to feel quite tiresome and repetitive.

Furthermore, as the difficulty increases, shortcomings in the controls get more obvious and the checkpoint-free nature of the levels makes this more tiresome.

Example: a lot of levels require you to jump from a platform, snapshot that platform and then paste it where you're going to land - but aiming and timing this feels random and when you need to do it 10 times to get to a star (any mistakes resulting in a restart) it's just boring.

I've also been killed on the 'wrong side' of spiky platforms a few times - and timing landings seems a bit wonky in places (resulting in you hitting spikes or whatever)

It's not a bad game - it's a lovely idea - but it's just too keen to punish you for what are it's mistakes and not yours...

If you want a platform game which plays backwards and can be beated in a single sitting of about 30 mins, this is definately it!!