Makever's Switching Sides, Or How I Learned To Hype My Games

Review by thelonewanderer on Tuesday, August 23rd 2016
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Click to play Switching Sides

Switching Sides is a game created by makever

Welcome to Makever's self-promoted strategic, multi-directional, survival shooter game. Strategic in the sense that you can randomly click buttons and win the game, multi-directional in the same vein as any game where you can move around, and survival in the sense that you will lose the game if you die... But wait, there is more! It has a total of 7 endings! In which it actually has 2 endings, with multiple variations on the story for each ending (a difference of a few dialog boxes or proposed unmentioned philosophical differences). Not to mention that one of the supposed endings is you just killing yourself at the start of the game, accompanied by it's own pseudo-philosophical meaning.



Now knowing that Switching Sides isn't really the game that Makever had promised, does it still stand up as a great game on it's own?


Well do you want to hear something crazy? People still believe in a flat-earth. Do you want to hear something true? The world, is in fact, round. Do you want to hear something crazy but true? Despite everything I have said so far, I did truly enjoy this game and I think that many games can take a few lessons from Switching Sides.


Because I don't review games with the intention of giving a score and rather focus on giving my advice to improve on its faults while congratulating it for what it has accomplished, I will start off by saying this game does a great job of melding the story into the gameplay. That being said, it does seem to suffer from a lack of direction due to Makever not being a native English speaker. By that I mean the game was obviously crafted to be played with the story, but due to a few barriers in the language coupled with the game not specifically telling you what to do - you will find yourself to be very oftenly confused.


The story itself is a poetic interpretation of your "conscience" and was handled with what I believe to be grace. A well-written story (aside from a small language barrier) that does a good job distinguishing itself from the norm. However, I feel that if Makever had shown his writing to a member of the forums and had them look over it, the story would have a better flow. He should have also either given more meaning to the switches or explained the mechanic behind them a lot better than he had in order to stop the typical user from constantly circling around in that section to see if any more switches has been unlocked by chance alone.


As for game-mechanics, the only two that truly stood out as impressive were the spawner mechanic and the robot-mojo mechanic - and I only say this because they really did a great job of progressing the story and making the "conscience" feel alive. Other game-mechanics like the polygon switches are very confusing as to what they accomplish and are usually pressed by the players in a random fashion.



Is this game as good as Makever thinks it is? Not really. Is this game as good as Makever told us it would be? No. But is it a great game? Yes it is.



Now I want you guys to use your "conscience" to do this - Join the Forums at www.sploder.info, make a game based around the coolest in-game mechanic you can think of, and send it to me through personal message, my username is ( ͡� ͜ʖ ͡�). If you do this, I will give it a play-through and it may possibly be *suggested for the EGL!


*Results may very