DANGER! AVOID THIS COLLECTION!
Also for: Windows
Let's take a moment of silence for level design.
...
We have all come here to bid farewell to a dear game component. It didn't just
die, it was murdered at the hands of Nape Games, who never should've
gotten the rights to be caretakers of any game. Level design will be laid to rest next to fun, challenge, and variation, all equally ill-fated. Let's hold our hands in prayer
and hope level design and its colleagues will find a better life in the next game. Amen.
I was debating myself whether I should review Ploid Saga or
not, but when I saw that it's priced at around 12 bucks (or 10 Euros) on Steam, I felt that I
must issue a warning. It's a collection of four games that appear
half-finished, almost like demos, and all of them are bad. They might look half-decent at first glance.
You might even play a couple of stages of one of the platform games and
think "nice tutorial level". But don't be fooled. It never leaves the tutorial. You'll soon
realize, like I did, that this collection is an effortless cashgrab.
It's a shame, because the platform games have decent controls (barring one fatal flaw that I'll get to later). In terms of presentation, the
visuals are tolerable and the thumping soundtrack even fairly good. It wants to appear like a classic game from the 8-bit, or 16-bit, era and might therefore think it'll get away with antiquated design standards. That's why I must write this review, because it's not a refurbished collection of old games - they're modern pieces of crap.
The four games are:
1. Void+ is a sidescrolling platformer. A crudely drawn
series of sketches illustrate the backstory. You choose between two different
Ploids (humans mixed with tech) who must stop a force of invading
aliens by traveling back and forth in time. The male Omega can shoot but moves slower, whilst the
female Alpha is lightning fast and can triple jump.
Every world consists of around 5 levels of a specific theme. They're horrendously designed,
with many taking something like 20 seconds to beat whilst others go on
forever. I swear I saw the same level setups a dozen times, with only
different backgrounds and enemies. Only one level on each world is a
proper stage of decent length, but even they are dull, with platforming challenges that only require you to get past the most basic obstacles. The underwater levels, with movement speed down to a crawl, are the worst.
You start off with five lives and can get one extra by collecting 100 gems that are scattered across each level. But with a game so easy, what's the point? And as soon
as you finish one world the lives reset to five and your gems to zero, so,
again, what's the point?
Overall, the challenge design is a complete disaster. The platforming is for
the most part completely trivial and bog-standard, except for a scant few ones that are nigh on
impossible. Some levels scroll horizontally, others vertically, and a few
both ways. A source of great fury is the blind drops, where the platforms below are out of sight so you don't know where you can safely steer your ploid. If you miss you fall to your death on the spikes at the bottom.
Another great annoyance is the unreliability of the double jump. It took
me a while to realize that you, for some reason, cannot stand too close to the
edge of a platform when you jump, or your second jump won't trigger. As
a result, I fell to a lower floor and had to replay a couple of sections over and over. Even worse are the
trampoline segments, which seem to cancel my mid-air jumps completely at random.
The enemy AI behavior is non-existent. All enemies move back and forth in the
same fixed pattern, only sometimes jumping over obstacles, without shooting or reacting to your prescence. If you jump
on their head they die instantly. A few blaster shots will take care of that
as well. The boss fights, which are all the same throughout, display identical, brainless behavior but can take more hits. They are among the easiest bosses I've ever seen.
Your health pool is
huge (unless you play as Alpha, who dies in one hit), so most deaths will come
from falling down pits or on spikes. No checkpoints exist, so you'll have to start from the
beginning of a stage if you die, which can be extremely aggravating on the
longer ones. Rating: A half-star.
2. Ploid is nearly identical to Void+. It contains longer
but fewer levels which makes it slightly better. Also, the visuals are improved, with more detailed enemies and backgrounds. The gameplay is
exactly the same, and the level design just as bad. And the final boss is an
absolute joke. Rating: A stronger half-star.
3. Uchusen is a horizontally scrolling space shooter that seems
thrown together in Shoot 'em up Construction Kit (if you're old, you
know) on a lunch break by a kid. It lacks all semblence of challenge and
effort. Of course, no auto-fire exists so you need to hammer the fire button
to keep the shots coming. It contains only seven levels on repeat (IIRC),
and each boss is the same - a motionless alien inside a metal structure, that only fires thin laser
shots straight ahead. You can place your ship just above it and shoot it to
death with your spreadshot and infinite missiles without taking a hit. Rating:
Zero stars.
4. Uchusen 2 is a vertical space shooter where you select your mobile
suit and try to survive for as long as possible. This one is, contrary to the
trend established by the other games, super hard, no matter what ship you
select. This entry at least has auto-fire, weapon power-ups and special attacks, but
is nevertheless a mess with iffy collision detection. You only get one life
and no checkpoints, and the power-ups are all useless, with unnoticeable
effects that are over in few seconds.
For some reason, the d-pad isn't utilized, so you need to handle the clunky
eight-directional controls with the left analogue stick. It's a disaster. You can only withstand a few hits, with no invincibility cooldown. Strangely enough, you can also fly right through ships without a hitch. The first boss is
ridiculously hard, with a ceaseless barrage of homing missiles hunting you down.
I only caught a glimpse of the second boss once, but only because the screen kept scrolling after I died.
Also, I managed to trigger an error code when I activated my special attack next to the boss. That's when I decided I'd had enough.
Rating: A half-star.
Summary: Some level of basic competency is missing at Nape Games. Their artistry is good, but as a studio they haven't got an inkling of how to create fair challenges,
nor do they seem to have heard of difficulty curves. At ten Euros, or twelve
American bucks, this is a complete rip-off. I bought it on a sale for
something like two bucks, which still was twelve bucks too much. Consider
yourself warned.
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