#12 Behold, The Art Of Pushing Circles.

Behold is a game created by 5guy

Game: Behold

Creator: 5guy

Platform: PPG

Intro: It seems that I'm back again with review number 12 now, as you can probably see I've recently got back into reviewing these days publishing my last review a few days ago. You see that's the advantage of rating centres, an occasional good game will pop by and make you go "Ohh hey I like this one." And that was my exact reaction to this game. However I must say, the name "5guy" doesn't exactly ring a bell, I haven't heard much of him either. Well, in face he posted another game in my rating centre too, but that wasn't so impressive...but then he comes along and posts this great game! My initial thoughts: "Is this guy hacked or something?" In all honesty I just couldn't exactly grasp how this huge leap occurred; one minute I receive a boring typical game then all of a sudden I get this.

I must say however, the thumbnail was rather bland and mysterious, I couldn't really get an idea of what the game was about. A rough description of what I saw was really just a bunch of black and white circles. However, there was so many possibilities I could think of such as: connecting the circles, avoiding circles collecting circles. But was any of those ideas correct? Let's find out shall we? Onto the main review.

Review:

Well my friend, I was wrong none of the concepts I listed were all out, what Behold is about is quite simply similar to golf essentially, you are a blue ball (if we relate this to golf you are the golfer) and you must push (hit) the white balls into the black hole lined with white (hole). So I start playing and I think "Well this looks easy." To start off with, the game itself was indeed rather bland with not much to show. However, it did begin to progress introducing a few new features to the game such as hazards, and spikes and in some cases obstructions to the canvas, these didn't exactly have a massive impact of the difficulty but did knock it up occasionally. But while we're on the topic of difficulty I must confess to a negative I found as I progressed. The difficulty is very alternating throughout, it's not just a simple incline of difficulty however a rocky road with bumps of difficulty. By this I mean the first level would be easy, the next level relatively hard, the next insanely hard, the net, very easy. So in a nutshell the difficulty was really up and down the whole time. In Behold's case, the game would generally be decently inclining then take a complete random, sudden drop to a pretty easy level ever 2 or 3 levels which I didn't like at all.

But gameplay wise I honestly quite enjoyed it to start, to start off with it was quite enjoyable just generally thinking about the game as a golf course which is what 5guy also tried to do by stating that the levels were metaphorically "holes" in golf which did add a tad bit of creativity to the overall game but not that much. However in all honesty the big dips in difficulty kind of lowered the quality of gameplay. Most good games generally go up in difficulty the whole time and never tends to drop; of course it may drop slightly but never to an amount that is so significant to be noticeable. The simple concept kind of lowered it further, I mean come on; all it really is, is pushing circles about. What's the chances of this being a new concept, fair enough it's probably been a couple of months since it happened but that doesn't really make it considered "new", it's still an old concept yet a returning one. However on the positive side, I do like to see old concepts returning back to modern day, it does bring a spark back from the old Sploder days however it shows somewhat a lack of creativity. As well as the actual additions to the levels being very minor and not having a fair impact. The only additions that really affected the game was the moving spikes and crates which also resulted in a huge difficulty jump. Even if that was not the case I felt like I was getting remotely bored towards the end meaning that this game can't exactly be the most enjoyable; I mean, in a game you want to attempt to keep the gamer interested. That wasn't really the case.

Maybe a bit of discussion about the actual scenery and the later additions now as I feel like I've went into so much detail there that there isn't so much left to discuss. The scenery itself was also rather bland, it was the exact same throughout and not very creative. All it really was, was a crate graphic used constantly as a background, not exactly the best idea if you're making it sound like golf; I mean, 5guy could've at least made the playfield slightly green and add some scenery such as sands and lakes. After all, from what I figured this was somewhat an inspiration from golf. Wait! I just noticed something about the game just this second. The level description says that you have to aim to put the white balls into the black ball outlined in white without falling in yourself, however; when you go across the actual hole, nothing happens. This therefore shows a clear lack of mechanism and physics used. Fair enough, it creates the coins but if that's in the description surely there should be a layer underneath that causes loss of life? Now, where was I? Ah yes, I was just about to go on about the additions. Honestly, the additions immensely lacked creativity, there was really no spark of idea at all, 5guy added the most bland, uncreative things possible. Hazards, well...that's simple. Crates, also simple, spikes, simple. There needs to be creativity to make a good, feature worthy game which there was not in Behold at all. Fair enough however, they did have a slight impact on the game but in all honesty as stated before it was not enough to trigger a steady rise at all.

Pros:

- Constant addition.

- Fairly enjoyable to start.

Cons:

- Huge lack of creativity.

- Difficulty drops.

- Gets boring as you progress.

Ratings:

Today my ratings will be split into the following sections:

Gameplay

Overall Difficulty

General Difficulty

Creativity

Gameplay: 5/10 - Eh, the concept kind of made the game seem "This is quite fun" but it was really generally boring.

Overall Difficulty: 6/10 - The sudden drops and rises made the overall difficulty well, fairly hard let's say.

General Difficulty: 4/10 - I mean, it was "okay" but the drops was really un-necessary.

Creativity: 3/10 - Really? An old concept, with old bland graphics, with old bland features.

Total: 17/40 - 4.25/10

Feature Worthy: Honestly, it's nowhere near feature worthy. It got boring towards the end, the difficulty was very alternating as well as being uncreative. A lot more work needs to be done; mainly on creativity.

Conclusion: Behold does prove to be a slightly above average game, better than most regular PPG's but it's missing a lot, such as the main points covered today: Creativity, difficulty maintenance. All in all it's a fairly enjoyable game but could do with some major tweaking.

-Over and knocked out ;)