Recent reviews by shrewdlogarithm

I enjoy this more on mobile because it works best when played in short bursts (and is fine on small screens too!) - it's a BIT less successful played on a and over longer sessions because that highlights the randomness...

The atmosphere, music etc. is all great but I almost always die through lack of fuel and I've not really found a way of avoiding that OTHER than good fortune in what I find in a given run.

So it's a recommended >IF< you can cope with a game which, whilst enjoyable, is maybe more luck than skill....

It looks great and has all of Grasshopper's trademark 'zanyness' - for some people that may be enough.

My problems with it are twofold tho

Firstly, there's an element of randomness in powerups which makes highscore chasing pointless - this means it gets stale once you've run through it a few times.

Secondly, most levels are simply a 'memory test' and deaths on end-bosses mean repeating the boring stuff which gets really tiresome. This is augmented by a time-limit element which complicates some fights and increases the trial-and-error/repetition to a truly tedious degree.

Basically - then crammed in features to stretch-out the content as long as possible - and whilst it's visually amazing, you do get sick of seeing it over and over because the game just doesn't tell you anything - it makes you learn by dying.

This has to be a "recommended" - it looks and sounds great and brings new ideas to a slightly stale genre.

It's not perfect tho - enemies and power-ups are randomized which makes every game feel different but which also makes high-scores a bit-too luck-of-the-draw. It wouldn't matter so much but stages quickly get quite lengthy which highlights poor choices/bad luck even more.

End of the day, every game is a new experience - which is great but it means this is NOT a game for high-score chasers, who I think will get bored of resetting the game in the hope of getting a better 'deal'??

I didn't realise all the pixels in my screen even had it in them to work this hard!!

This is an odd one, the graphics are are a bit basic/flat, sounds are "functional" and the 'talking heads' bits between levels are terrible - BUT

The game under all of that is bloody good. Whoever designed the attack/bullet patterns and weapon options knows EXACTLY what they're doing - it's challenging and rewarding. Music is also exactly what you'd expect for this sort of game.

There's plenty of modes, online highscore tables (with replays) - controls can be rebound/changed (keyboard or pad)

I've gotten a load of fun out of it - I reckon you might too, just ignore those 'talking head' bits eh? :)

First-up - the writing in this is awful and it's shoved into your face repeatedly in lengthy, unskippable (often repeated if you die) cutscenes in which cliched characters drone on and on about cliched nonsense - if it's trying to be ironic, it failed on me - it not, it's just awful.

The game - when you eventually get into it - isn't anything special either. The earlier games were sharper - movement here is laboured, reloading/choosing weapons is clumsy and your bullet-time moves often don't quite work as planned. You will get the hang-of-it but it's not a step forward imo

Every level is a sequence of set pieces with corridors inbetween for exposition - but the feeling the early games had of there being a 'solution' to each set-piece isn't so obvious here and there's no progression because you're still the same cliched and addled ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Over time enemies gain the ability to survive direct headshots/multiple shotgun blasts to the face and ammo becomes scarce because - well - let's assume they tried to make an action film in which you drive the 'shooty bits' but a game which also gets harder and those things don't mesh.

Watching an action movie, you don't want the hero to fail - you don't want them to stumble into stuff - you don't want bullet-sponge enemies who don't drop - you don't want the hero leaping gracefully into a wall/sign/fence, you don't want the hero shot to death over and over as they figure out what the developer intended (repeating the story in case you forgot it from 20 seconds earlier)

Progress here has not been useful.

tl;dr - Play the earlier ones first and then play them again

Looks OK, sounds OK, seems to have it's heart in the right place but it lacks polish and feels, at times, like it goes out of it's way to kill you just to make a point about something.

Controls aren't great - even after I customised them (in windowed mode, it's in the menu - in fullscreen you're SoL) - you move with just enough inertia to make positioning yourself tricky and the way you jump/duck allied to the '4 directions only' firing feels really, really dated.

So it wasn't for me - if you'd like a Metroid-alike so retro it's more retro than Metroid tho, this may be for you?

First-up, it looks great, sounds great and has actual puzzles - no real issues there.

I'm not recommending it for a few reasons tho - they're kinda personal and MIGHT not apply to you but I'm raising em because they might!

1 - it's a puzzle game with no story/aim/objective or goal - just "solve the puzzles". I thought I could cope with that but after a while you do kinda wonder why you're bothering?


2 - you could solve most puzzles if you could jump a slightly larger gap or run (you can't) or just climb around the side of the portals - e.g the difficulty is in the limitations of movement and not the cleverness of the puzzles - no locked rooms or impossible leaps here, just roadblocks.

3 - puzzles can solved by elimination or deduction. These puzzles quickly add a LOT of combinations which means lots of elimination but are involved enough to make deduction pretty hard (and all the puzzles I saw were single-solution)

4 - I got motion sickness/a headache after about 5mins of play - after 2 attempts I gave-up. It's not something I've had much before (The Ball did it - that's about it) but this does it really well!

So, it's a fine game where everything works but it lacks some stuff. It needs some sort of a carrot to keep you playing, some reason for accepting the limitations of movement and it could feel a bit more of a puzzle to be deduced and a bit less of rat maze to be beaten by sheer effort.

YMMV

This is one of those "maybe" games but I'm erring to "Not Recommended" just so people are aware of the issues it has.

Most obvious - it's clear they intended this game to be large or even multi-part story but that never happened so it doesn't feel like a completed thing as-is - that doesn't mean it's not fun at times, it just means it's not "all of a piece".

I've had issues around alt-tab since Beta and they're STILL THERE even now. Alt-tabbing will almost certainly leave the game in an immovable/hard-to-interact-with window - it may cause the game to just stop responding entirely - it's almost never a good idea to do it.

Saving is limited - you always restart from the nearest quest hub - and I've lost progress after a hang/crash a few times - I've lost progress after exitting properly a few times too - add that to it's dislike of alt-tab and you have a recipe for frustration which has led to me stop playing more-than-once.

Difficulty varies WILDLY - you'll spend a lot of time doing really easy stuff and then hit something REALLY hard - often just a random mob which is super-tough or whatever - it clearly needed more polishing.

All of that is a real shame because I like the setting, music, voicework, concept, playstyle, itemisation - it had a tonne of potential and ever time I come back to it I enjoy it for a while before I hit yet another pothole/crash and quit again!

tl;dr lovely idea about half polished/finished and just a bit too crashy to recommend as-is.

Fantastic little adventure game about time-travel and the end-of-all-life.

Tight, logical (OK - the apple thing maybe weirdly leftfield!), doesn't overstay it's welcome - genuinely surprising ending

I enjoyed it!