Bad Luck? Maybe.

Bad Luck is a game created by checkthepan

Pre-thoughts: The reason I chose this game is simple. Any game by Checkthepan is a must play. You have no choice. His games were revolutionary in many ways. Throughout his Sploder career, he continuously brought new concepts to the shooter creator. His 60 features are evidence of this claim. Now, with all this being said, you may be asking...why review an older game? Why not review a newer one that has all the bells and whistles? The answer to these questions is ingenuity. Most games you see today are overused. The traps, action, and game play are all old news. The real challenge is to find a concept that no one has used yet, and that is exactly what Checkthepan has done with this game.

Game play: Bad Luck is set up into chambers, each being a different challenge that you have to complete. What's interesting about Bad Luck is that there is hardly any enemies. The challenges are strictly skill and knowledge, which are based on a 25:75 ratio. The skill aspects of Bad Luck are mainly associated with one or two chambers. You have to know exactly when and where you want your ship to go and exactly how you are going to do it. I will not explain much further on these chambers, for that would be a walk through. The knowledge part however, is everywhere in the game. Now to be fair, these parts can be fairly easy. But if you think back to when this game was created, nobody knew how to do this. It was a whole new frontier in shooter games so to speak. Hardly anyone who played Sploder back in the early days knew about invisible lines, teleporter traps, etc. That's what made it so hard. How can you beat a game when you have no idea what's happening?

Another reason I chose Bad Luck was because of memorization. Any player can power their way through a game, but how many can remember how they did it? Checkthepan set his chambers up so that you had to go through all of them, twice. This in effect doubles the difficulty of the game, or in the case of Bad Luck, 1.5x. The reason for this is because some of the traps are one-time activation. An example of this is the nitro block trap. I won't go into details, but it can kill you pretty quickly if you are not careful. Finally, I want to mention the replay value of this game. You just cannot stop. Bad Luck has achieved that certain addiction value that just draws the players in. Sure, you can beat it on your first try, but you just want to keep trying to beat your own time. That's what happened to me when I was checking this game out. I ended up spending half an hour just trying to beat my time.

Conclusion: During its time, Bad Luck was one of the best games out there. You can try and prove me wrong, but you will be hard pressed to find a better game of this style. Innovative traps, a new way to test your knowledge about hazards, and being easily playable by both new and old members alike. The only drawback I saw was the lack of enemies. Even just a few would have spiced the game up nicely. All in all, this game was fresh. A nice little detour from all the repetitiveness during that time. As a game, it was average, but as a concept, it was revolutionary.

Pros:

New puzzles (during the time it was made)

Original

Very playable

Addicting

Cons:

Lack of enemies

Slightly harder traps would have been nice

The length of time it takes to beat this game

Scoring: (5 point scoring system)

Challenge: 4.5

Item Placement: 4

Enemy Placement: 2.5 (Due to lack of enemies. The few that were placed were relatively easy to kill)

Puzzles: 5

Creativity: 5

Final Score: 21/25