What A Purdy Looking Thumbnail...

IMPERIAL DEFEAT 2 is a game created by deathleaf

Welcome to SKR, "Because we can".

Game: Imperial defeat 2.

Maker: Deathleaf

Type: Adventure

Prethoughts

I was looking around some of the good creators pages, and this caught my eye. The part of this game that really intrigued me was the thumbnail. Judging by this thumbnail, the game looks pretty good. The picture has a nice sort of symmetry to it and I like the choice of blocks. Already, you can see the first puzzle. It looks like you will have to find a switch to escape a small room. This is a familiar beginning to the creator, deathleaf, and he uses it often, but usually with some sort of twist to make it original. Hopefully he can pull that off here once again. Deathleaf is a feature creator. His games are cherished and respected. Most are reviewed over and over, featured, and viewed fifty million times. However, there is something odd about this one. It is old and lacks not only a feature, but also a review. Why? Is it a bad game? Or is it simply unnoticed, buried under deathleaf's numerous games? Maybe I've hit the reviewing bonanza, the gold mine of undiscovered games... Or, it could just be fool's gold.

Gameplay

Design- The first puzzle, I must admit, was really clever. As I suspected, you have to find a switch, but it takes that puzzle beyond where most take it. I don't want to give anything away, but it is a rather creative trick on an already interesting start. Kudos to deathleaf for that first puzzle. A promising looking start. This game is one with numerous passages. I like these kind of games, but they can be rather irritating... You can follow one passage for a while only to find out it was a bust, and some of the ladders kept reaching skyward for what seemed like hours to climb them; just a bit too long for my liking. If the length of all of those had been cut in half, it would have been more interesting, and you wouldn't have spent all of your time climbing. The layout was nice, but tedious. I also longed invariably for something interesting to look at wandering those long, dreary passages. However, I liked the design a lot. There were several places where it was so cool to play. There were parts where you had to jump off a ledge and onto a ladder, parts where you would fall and latch on to a ladder just before boiling in lava, parts where you had to do tricky things under pressure. If it wasn't for all the lengthiness, it would have nailed this section.

Decoration/Block Placement- Now, I mean this in the most respectful of ways, but it seemed to me that in some places, it was sloppy. There were lava tops left without something behind them, leaving bleak patches of gray sky. There were also parts when the ladder failed to reach the top of the passage. This may have been intended, but ends up making the game look even more sloppy, and also annoying to get to the top. There were other errors, also, where simple tweaks could have made the game look so much better. For example, putting a tile to cover that blank spot or moving the ladder up a space or two. Things that seem trivial during the making of the game, but end up to be more important than you could think at first. It is almost a painful to watch a game that had so much potential be ruined by something as simple as this.

Enemy Placement- Luckily for the game, I could find only a few flaws with the enemy placement. Sadly, these were some noticeable flaws. It wasn't like there was an enemy that was put right next to lava so you could push them in or any other simple mistakes. These were some seriously bad mistakes. There was one especially annoying one where an enemy was placed just outside of a lava pit. Every time you try to jump over the lava, you run into him like a car into a brick wall and fall right back into the lava, making that part nearly impossible. But then there were a few brief triumphant moments in the enemy placement, like when a turret was placed in a place where you have to wall jump, shooting at you in your desperate attempt to gather some crystals. That was another one of those little designer touches that just made the game really fun to play.

Creativity- Although I liked the thumbnail, the real game ended up looking a lot like deathleaf's other games, with the same style, feeling, gameplay... The only difference is, this one wasn't nearly as good. It was just a cheap copy of the real Mona Lesa. To me, I didn't see anything that was groundbreaking or new. It had already done. Over and over again. Deathleaf seems to be stuck in a plat rut, he needs to make a new game that isn't this one.

Fun/Challenge- Despite its many, many flaws in everything else, this game was very enjoyable to play. Like I mentioned before, you really feel like a beast playing it. Sadly though, some of the problems mentioned before, like block placement, made it really frustrating at times, and everything else made the gameplay suffer as well.

Pros:

This was a really fun game to play, at key moments it had good enemy and block placement, there was a nice, coherent pallet for the decoration, an extremely good-looking thumbnail, and an intriguing first puzzle.

Cons:

This game suffered from some really bad enemy placement, drawling annoying hallways, horizontally challenged ladders, unwaveringly boring decoration, the game was rather unoriginal and bland, and the loooong passageways sometimes made for boring gameplay.

Conclusion

Overall: 12/25

Sadly, my gold mine turned out to be filled with fool's gold... Not feature worthy, but maybe it could win a contest with some tweaks. Thanks for reading,

-SKR