[SGCA] 200th Time's The Charm.

Review by lumberjay on Wednesday, December 5th 2012

Disclaimer: This review format is primarily used for entertainment purposes. All grievances I hold for this game are exaggerated to bring to light the issues of the game. Enjoy

Today, I shall take pleasure in introducing a new format into the reviewer’s arsenal, the Critique, under the newly founded Sploder Game Critics Association: enduring the strife, so you don’t have to.

So, to get this out of the way, I enjoyed this game, but by George was it frustrating. There is a cliche of trial and error, and how one must overcome difficult adversities only by failing the first time. This game is sort of like that, except failing is expected at least 100 times before the beating the first level of actual game. Success in this game reminds me of the age-old experiment of the mouse and the cheese hooked up to an electric current. You know you want that cheese, but at some point, you wonder if it’s really worth the trouble of getting 100 watts absorbed into your skull.

But in all seriousness, the trial & error of the game does give it a lot of challenge. Challenging, of course, is a subjective term. You can probably get challenge from digging into a sheet of bedrock with your fingernails, but you certainly wouldn't have fun with that for too long, especially when your fingernails fall off. This of course begs the question, “did I have fun?” Short answer: yes. But what kind of critic would I be if I just went on the brief, somewhat forced, fun I had?

Survivor takes trial and error to a whole new level. The second level, I was able to overcome with my sheer intellect, seeing as that’s all I had to go on. That’s because there was no real hint on what I could control! The first level, however, was only solved by the sheer grace of the 8 pound, 6 ounce baby Jesus, as that’s all I could count on, either that, or be the creator, Deathleaf. I’m not going to go on for the other six levels, because they can mostly be described with both the first or second level summaries and maybe both…

In short, I loved this game, and you should go and check it out. I feel I should drive home the fact that you will most likely not finish this game and will have wasted precious minutes of your life, but the same could be said for every game, even the ones that you have completed.

If you are reading this, you are probably going to give me flak toward my brief talking about the game itself, and that I either made this too short or too long, to which I will reply, “IT DOESN'T MATTER!” but what do I know, I've only been reviewing for a year or two, and since I’m introducing a new review style, I might as well be mapping out the closest route to Atlantis from Hamburg, Germany.

If my cynicism and sarcasm appear too harsh, that only means I’m doing my job.