Something tells me this title either took waaaay too long to think of or just popped into the heads of one of the developers while they were on the can...but I digress.
This is the kind of game that makes me want to neglect playing and reviewing DigiPen games as a whole in favor of wrecking shop in Saints Row 2. There's virtually nothing to talk about that I haven't said a million times before, so this review is inevitably going to end up being about as large and imposing as a shrew in a sinkhole.
I'll say this much: this game has possibly the worst conveyance of any game on this list I've played. What should have taken 0.0000001 seconds ended up taking like 3 minutes because the developers thought it was essential to crowbar in some incredibly basic...things which I refuse to call humor before it let me play. The text boxes fade in and out in no hurry at all, and by the time you actually start playing, you're already insanely frustrated by what you just had to sit through, so you're probably going to end up just running straight through the not-very-thoughtfully-designed levels with no inclination to keep running...like how I felt during races when I was on the track team.
If I had to compliment the game on one thing, it would have to be the character design, which conveys enough about out character to make him relatable (without the help of those accursed text boxes) while also making him slightly lovable...of course, this is vastly overshadowed by the crap factor.
Then the game crashed, which was my excuse to stop playing fo' good. So yeah, that's all I got for now. Until next time, stay evil.
Links
Gotta love portmanteaus: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=473
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Redemption
It's not very often I come across a DigiPen game with a decent plot. What with the time constraints and limited resources that I assume these students have to work under, most of them don't even try coming up with a plot for their games. Even the ones that do sort of just establish a setting and leave the rest up to the imagination.
Redemption is sort of a condensed version of everything I think a video game plot should be. And I mean really condensed. A quick bit of text at the beginning establishes that a manmade substance called Sample17 has effectively rid the world of humanity and it's up to you, a cleaner robot, to clear out the evil goo and make the world habitable again. It's kind of like the plot to Wall-e, except...well, you know...good. In fact, your character actually looks a bit like Eve's brother as he goes through his punk rock phase.
Now, the plot of Redemption took a bold step into the unknown just by existing, which is respectable, but if humanity was wiped out by this Sample17 nonsense, then who is communicating with you and telling you to clean the place up? The beginning text makes it seem like you're just hearing the recordings of scientists just before they were consumed by their creation, which is emotionally moving enough to get me in the right mood for busting some evil purple gooey heads, but then how do the training rooms make sense? The same text that sounded completely defeated by this Sample17 is now telling you not only that they were able to isolate a relatively harmless sample of it, but also develop weapons to stop it AND leave those weapons in close proximity to the Sample17. Wouldn't it make more sense to just have the weapons laying around broken down labs for you to find? After all, if the humans were capable of developing weapons that halt Sample17's growth, how did they manage to get eradicated by it?
These weapons aren't exactly pea shooters, either. With that excellent segue, I can now talk about the game feel. It's damn amazing. The shotgun makes anything in its proximity into a cowering little bitch, and I assume the weapons I'd have unlocked later are even cooler. The reason I didn't play far enough to find out is because the first non-tutorial level hides the goop spawners so infuriatingly well that I end up just running around aimlessly as the area gets completely covered by death, which I would dare to call the game's biggest flaw, even though the rest of the levels could be perfectly streamlined for all I know.
The game looks nice if you can get past the Minecraft-esque block aesthetic, which is essentially the 3D version of pixel art. The music and sound effects compliment the setting nicely, and if it weren't for the aforementioned plotholes and design flaw, I would dare to call this game nothing shy of amazingly crafted.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay redeemed:
Links
What do you need to be redeemed for? You're a robot: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26061
Redemption is sort of a condensed version of everything I think a video game plot should be. And I mean really condensed. A quick bit of text at the beginning establishes that a manmade substance called Sample17 has effectively rid the world of humanity and it's up to you, a cleaner robot, to clear out the evil goo and make the world habitable again. It's kind of like the plot to Wall-e, except...well, you know...good. In fact, your character actually looks a bit like Eve's brother as he goes through his punk rock phase.
Now, the plot of Redemption took a bold step into the unknown just by existing, which is respectable, but if humanity was wiped out by this Sample17 nonsense, then who is communicating with you and telling you to clean the place up? The beginning text makes it seem like you're just hearing the recordings of scientists just before they were consumed by their creation, which is emotionally moving enough to get me in the right mood for busting some evil purple gooey heads, but then how do the training rooms make sense? The same text that sounded completely defeated by this Sample17 is now telling you not only that they were able to isolate a relatively harmless sample of it, but also develop weapons to stop it AND leave those weapons in close proximity to the Sample17. Wouldn't it make more sense to just have the weapons laying around broken down labs for you to find? After all, if the humans were capable of developing weapons that halt Sample17's growth, how did they manage to get eradicated by it?
These weapons aren't exactly pea shooters, either. With that excellent segue, I can now talk about the game feel. It's damn amazing. The shotgun makes anything in its proximity into a cowering little bitch, and I assume the weapons I'd have unlocked later are even cooler. The reason I didn't play far enough to find out is because the first non-tutorial level hides the goop spawners so infuriatingly well that I end up just running around aimlessly as the area gets completely covered by death, which I would dare to call the game's biggest flaw, even though the rest of the levels could be perfectly streamlined for all I know.
The game looks nice if you can get past the Minecraft-esque block aesthetic, which is essentially the 3D version of pixel art. The music and sound effects compliment the setting nicely, and if it weren't for the aforementioned plotholes and design flaw, I would dare to call this game nothing shy of amazingly crafted.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay redeemed:
Links
What do you need to be redeemed for? You're a robot: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26061
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