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Review by moolatycoon on Friday, June 10th 2016

Hello avid readers, I am back for another magical review where I crush some dreams. Lavalinn is a virtually unheard of member in the featured games community. Fresh talent is always a good thing to see and we hope to see more featured games out of Lavalinn now that he has some attention, but today we are here to give him more attention and shed some light on this oddball game. "Tiny Box Time Quest For Warfstaches" is a pretty odd title, especially for those relatively unfamiliar with markiplier such as myself. No worries, for this reflects very little on the actual game.

How does the actual game square up to its competition? Let's find out.

One thing you'll notice immediately about Tiny Box Tim, is that its on the difficult side, and not all of this difficulty is entirely the player's fault. The controls are rather stiff, though to the creator's credit this does provide some real life simulation of what it would be like to be a box. In any case, these stiff controls are rather awkward to deal with when the hit box detection is very punishing. More often then not, I died touching spikes because they where on the same level as the player rather than lowered a little bit into a pit as the effect was intended to be (I'm looking at you first jump of level one). Additionally the jumping was a little unresponsive and for me it seemed to be the most moody when I was almost done with a level, meaning I had to return to the start again. Tiny Box Tim is certainly a difficult game for these reasons, but it is by no means impossible. Through perseverance I managed to complete the game in a reasonable amount of time. The thing that bleeps most about these controls is that the game itself is unforgiving in that you only have one shot to make it though the level. With more responsive controls (maybe its motion resistance, but something just feels off when controlling the player compared to other ppg plats) this game would be a lot easier and more enjoyable while providing a decent challenge. To his credit, Lavalinn does (for the most part) provide a multitude of well placed enemies and traps that challenge the player to adapt to their environment. To his credit, when it wasn't the controls killing me, it was normally my own fault, meaning that the game isn't full of cheap enemy placement, something that often gets out of hand in current games. While this game has appropriate design difficulty, there is a lot of artificial difficulty created by the poor controls. The control issue may not be entirely in the creator's power, but they should have at least attempted to either fix the problems or make the game slightly more forgiving.

One thing I can appreciate about this game are the well made visuals. For the most part, everything is custom textured, and you can tell Lavalinn put a lot of handiwork into making the levels look nice. Obviously the character itself and the enemies aren't the most exciting, and the aesthetics aren't mind blowing, but they are enough to be charming and they show that the creator put a lot of love and effort into their game. Another example of lavalinn putting love into his game was integrating new mechanics as you got further in (such as ice blocks, or shooting enemies). He would ease the player into the concept and then have it appear in a later level in a more complex puzzle format. This was a cool way to pace the player into the game, and would have been appreciated more had the controls been a bit more forgiving. I will ding him on the final boss though, because dodging fire for 20 seconds isn't particularly climactic.

One issue I have with the game is that the levels start to get a little boring after a while as you see repeated concepts. I believe that there are 2 levels almost identical save for one section having a moving platform while the other has ice towers. I would have liked to see lavalinn innovate more in the game instead of continuing to recycle concepts after a certain point. There just feels like he could have made the game a bit more interesting, or perhaps made the levels larger. What the game presents you is good but when you see that he just basically re-uses a level, you can tell he ran out of ideas, which is never a thing you want to show someone who is playing your game, because they will be less inclined to play it again at a later time.

Ratings:

Verdict

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-=Decent=-

I suppose the big question is "Did I have fun while playing this game?" The answer is yes, this is a modest, but still enjoyable game. You'll have to get past the frustrating controls but its a nice quick play if you have 15-20 minutes to kill. Lavalinn shows a lot of potential and I look forward to what he will produce in the future.