(EGD) Sigh

Review by beast4321 on Wednesday, August 19th 2020

Sigh.

Beast, present and accounted for, a walking catastrophe of a reviewer come to review a stationary catastrophe of a game.

You know what? Sploder is tough. Making decent games? It takes effort. A lot of it. There's scenery to do, gameplay to polish, action sequences to test. It takes many years of mistakes, failure and harsh, harsh criticism from members to get any good at it. One does not churn out a feature overnight. You can expect to spend many years failing before you get anywhere.

Or, you know. You could spend minimal effort on six levels of floating heads and enter it into the most prestigious contest on Sploder.

I think this one's going to be short and messy.

There was no story. Good. I dread to imagine how Star would justify this train wreck with a narrative.

Gameplay was rather dry and unimaginative. Boss fights, in the PPG creator. Cuz that's never been done before. In summary, each level, a massive floating head, probably smeared in a graphic of one of Star's friends, shoots stuff at you and you shoot back. The enemy has a shield. Yeah, alright. You've got a cooldown on your shooting. Interesting, adds a bit of strategy, but nothing special. Each level adds a tougher boss, more projectiles to dodge, flying sandwiches, Wordigirl with a massive tongue protruding from the side of her face, mario kart banana skins and Ethan2009, who for some reason drops pointy hands (wat) and even, at the end, lasers. I'll admit, I did like the ice level, which stops you moving occasionally, at which point the player dodges projectiles until they can move again. That was it. If you told me this was a piece of surrealism, I would've believed you. I might even have enjoyed it more. Instead, I found myself laughing at how Star had managed to take this all seriously. It's possible to make good boss fights in the PPG creator. Play Solar Sniper. Play Jumpie. I've seen it done. What both have in common in that they don't repeat the same concept over and over, in what appeared to be an attempt to give the player a brain haemorrhage. I'll admit it was vaguely exciting. You know, the first time. The second time? The third time? Not so much.

But hey, enjoy hammering the space bar and arrow keys, completing the same thing, over and over again, for twenty minutes? You've found your game. Have fun.

Level design was meh; cool down bar on the left, boss at the top, you at the bottom. Looked messy. Didn't ruin the gameplay (haha.)

Scenery was boring. Default backgrounds on every single level. No effort whatsoever. Remember kiddies, it's good practise to hide the lines that AI mechanics leave, because they look really bad.

How long did it take you to make this? I'm betting two hours. Three most. I could've made this game the night before the EGD deadline. If, you know, I wanted to lose. Sometimes being a reviewer feels fantastic, when you've found an absolute gem and I get to say nice things for once. Sometimes it's difficult, when I'm absolutely crucifying something someone has put a lot of effort into. And sometimes it's just funny.

Seriously, making feature worthy games isn't for everyone. It takes a long time and a lot of effort. What's most important about Sploder is having fun; if your fun is creating a load of heads and shooting at them, knock yourself out. You should make what you enjoy, and because we have different opinions on what we enjoy, this isn't a problem and I don't mean to suggest it is. Just don't expect to enter EGD with something like this and not get torn to pieces.