Echo

Oh how I love the feeling I get when the blog reaches another letter.  Oddly enough, getting to "E" isn't the only milestone in my little project this time around.  Echo is the first FPS game on my list.  Make no mistake, though, Echo is not a typical FPS game.  No, typically, FPS games are fun...

Ok, so there are a few things that I like about Echo.  If you press "esc" it takes you to a kind of interactive options menu where you interact with nodes by shooting them.  I wish more games would implement that.  There's not even any deep reasoning for it.  I just think it's cool.

Also, I like the way everything is conveyed.  You experience things by doing them and it's not confusing.  The game never feels the need to say "hey, listen.  Jump on that plant."  It trusts that the player will look at the plant opening with the little circley thingies coming out of it and infer that he or she is supposed to jump on it.

Too bad that's pretty much the extent of the stuff I liked about Echo.  The rest of it annoyed me.

First off, I'd like to speak directly to all who hope to go into a career in sound mixing.  Please don't make the sound effects so obnoxiously loud.  They should be about as loud as the music.  When you kill things in this game, they release a hissing sound that hurts my ears.

Also, the sight of shooting projectiles is so jumpy that it hurts my eyes.  This isn't helped by the neon visual style.  So far, my only senses left unscathed are touch, taste and smell.  At least the control setup is comfortable (and I would find it very impressive for the game to harm my senses of smell or taste).

I also hate how the game wrestles control from you every 2 seconds.  Again, I think it's good that the game trusts me to make inferences, but come on.  Yanking the camera from me to show me some unexplained phenomenon that makes no sense to me and that I end up skipping anyway is just not polite, and this game does it every thirty seconds!

Ehh, I'm getting tired.  One more rage point before I sign out for the day:  I have no idea what I need to do to beat this game.  As far as I can tell, the enemies spawn infinitely and there are no targets other than the enemies.   It seems like the only ending to this game is a big fat "Lose" screen.  That's not a bad thing, and in fact that kind of structure has vastly improved games like Missile Command (I learned that from watching Extra Credits.  Have I mentioned I like those guys?).  Thing is, Missile Command scores you.  It gives you some kind of sense of accomplishment.  Echo does not, and honestly, the rest of the game is way too vague for it to fall back on the "artistic statement" argument.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay bright.

Links
pew pew screeeeaaaaaaiiiiiieeeeieieeieiiiieeeeegh: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18585
a much more entertaining thing that I alluded to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQJA5YjvHDU

Duality

Duality is a first person 3D platforming puzzle game that focuses on solving puzzles by taking advantage of seamless dimensional rifts."  You mean...portals?  Oh dear, it's going to be one of those reviews, isn't it?  I thought I had my obligatory "this game is trying to be Portal review with Crystaline.  Well who knows, maybe this game will turn out to be original after all.

...nope.

Oh okay, fine, it's not exactly like Portal.  It also features dual-world gameplay (hence the title) so yeah nothing really too original to be seen here.  Oh well, just because the game's not terribly interesting doesn't mean it's not fun, right?

Well it's not boring, so that's good.  The levels are largely linear, leaving little room for the player to get lost.  The mechanics are functional and intuitive, the 3D world is really pretty and the music is enjoyable, especially when it fades from Dark World to Light World.  That said, why am I not particularly enthusiastic about this game?  It would be because there's simply not enough ingenuity or fun to be had to justify the little quirks about this game. The little things nipping at my heels would be perfectly acceptable if there was some sort of larger payoff, like if they were scraping the dead skin off my heels and making me look young again.  But as it stands, they're just pesky little annoyances that I'd rather kick into the next dimension.


For one thing, the bridges that you have to make for yourself are conveyed very poorly.  They're made out of glowing orbs that all form together to make one circular disk.  The problem is that it's impossible to tell at first glance where one disk begins and the other ends, leading to several moments like this:

This one in particular tricked me into falling into the lake below, which instantly teleported me to the beginning where I had to undo all my progress just to redo it again in.  Yeah, it's one of those games...

Another thing that grinds my gears is that in the third and final level, these moving portals are introduced.  They are never referred to again and they're completely obnoxious.  They don't add any level of challenge or depth, they just make you play the game at the game's pace, which is really annoying.  Remember Super Mario 64? That game knew how to implement moving platforms.  The player had to calculate the right moment to jump in order to progress.  It was challenging and fun.  The moving portals in Duality are neither of those.

And why is it that in the first 2 levels, the Light World's water turns into the Dark World's lava, but in the third level it's always water?  This whole game just feels a bit unfinished.  Not the broken kind of unfinished like Sonic '06, but the annoying "beta-build" feel that makes it seem like you're playtesting rather than playing.

Duality isn't terrible.  It had potential to be cool, albeit not very original, but it blew it with clumsy design.  The game as a whole isn't really that challenging.  All the puzzles are very simple, even the last one.  I was able to blow through all of them without even thinking, and I'm not usually very good at puzzle games.

Cool concept, sub-par game.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay bipolar.

Links
more like Poo-ality...heh: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=11752