Who?

Review by bricc on Sunday, March 31st 2019

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is Bricc, but this time on a Thursday after-college-noon. After working on my research document for hours and enduring a 3 hour 45 minute lesson without a break, I was in a mood to just sit back, relax, and chill. I was looking through the featured list to see if anything good was to be found. Continuing on my search for PPG games beyond page 6, where I found Seafaring Adventure, I came across a game that strangely attracted my eyes over to it as if it were a magnet, and that game was Guess Who by futuremillionare. I was a little 50/50 on reviewing this game, because I figured a game with only one level of actual "gameplay" would be difficult to review, but I decided to just give it a shot anyway.

New or old, as a member of Sploder you've most likely stumbled upon a futuremillionare game before or at the very least have heard of him. As far as I'm aware, he's good with almost all (if not all) of the game creators, though I can only vouch for his PPG skills because I'm absolutely terrible at playing games made with the other creators. To put it simply, my expectations were quite high. If I remember correctly, there was a mass unfeaturing incident at some point and the featured page, in some parts, lists the games in the wrong order due to them being featured again, so I'm not entirely sure if this is one of his newer or older projects; I can only go by the date it was published which was June 2016. That's almost 3 years ago, but even then I believe futuremillionare was a well received game maker so ultimately my standards remain high.

As I stated in my introduction, my eyes were strangely attracted to the thumbnail of Guess Who. The game has a fairly vibrant thumbnail, using bright blue for the sky and a couple of shades of green, which is honestly probably what did it. Thumbnails have a tendency to look quite dull or don't fill up the space, but that's not the case for this one. Granted, this is definitely not the most original thumbnail, but it had managed to grab my attention very quickly compared to those around it. When I read the game title, Guess Who, I was extremely intrigued. I was sure I'd heard this title before somewhere and wondered if it was a coincidence or if it was based off another game. Admittedly, the characters in the thumbnail didn't look fantastic but got me thinking "What do you mean by Guess Who?", so I clicked on the game to see what it was all about.

There is no storyline to follow in Guess Who, but I understood why once I realised that it was based off the Guess Who board game. Personally, I'm a huge fan of board games and this was one that I used to love playing. It's perfect to recreate as a Sploder game, too - everyone knows it and it can be played fairly quickly in one session. The idea is that you're given a list of people and a picture of them, ask questions to the other player (in this case a computer player) who was given the name and picture of one of the individuals on your list and you try to figure out which person they have using the answers to the questions you asked. The first level is just an intro (with no gameplay), so we'll skip over that. I have to admit that I'm quite impressed by the execution of futuremillionare's version of the game. I know a fair amount about the physics creator and how everything works, but I have no clue how futuremillionare managed to create a CPU player and pull this off. After playing through the game many times, I was unable to encounter any bugs or issues. Considering how many decisions the computer has to make, the loading screen does not appear for long at all. This in turn makes the "gameplay" (can I call it that?) very smooth and not frustrating to have to retry, adding to the replayability. You don't see many games on Sploder that rely on an interface to play, so I think I can say that's at least sort of original. Overall, Guess Who is a very consistently functional game and one that I could happily play again.

I think this game is at a perfect difficulty level. It's hard enough to lose sometimes, but not too hard that you'll have to retry a stupid number of times to win. It takes 5 failed guesses to lose and considering there are 12 characters to guess from and 12 possibilities for answers to the questions, it seems to be a fair amount of chances to give the player. Although the way the game is set up now does stick to the original concept and still works very well, I think for the Sploder version it would've been pretty neat if futuremillionare had made multiple levels with increasing difficulty. I know how difficult the event links and objects must be to manage, however keeping the same concept and changing things up a little wouldn't be impossible. For example, maybe a level where you have 4 guesses instead of 5, or a level where the accessories/questions are different (eg. freckles). Either way, I still think the difficulty works well for a game with one level.

The only downfall to this game is its appearance. I'm not saying the way it looks is bad, but in comparison to the gameplay this is where the game lacks quality. I personally am not a fan of the mix of graphics and default PPG textures. I feel that some of the features of the characters should've been made as graphics such as the beards. They look very out of place as the circles that make up the beards are way too big. I mean, I would expect that in real life you don't have either a hedge as a beard or no beard. Plus, I think keeping everything to one style is always good. Since this game relies on an interface rather than more of a physical game, I would've expected futuremillionare to have spent a little more time on the way it looks. A nicer font maybe? Maybe recreate the board from the board game? There's room for improvement in this department and a lot more that could've been done, but I've definitely seen a lot worse.

Ratings

Story • N/A • Based off a board game and I wouldn't expect it to have a story.

Thumbnail • 3/5 • Caught my eye for sure, though I'm not entirely sure why. Nothing amazing.

Visuals • 2.5/5 • Very average. I'd expect this quality from an average game maker.

Gameplay • 4/5 • Sticks to the original board game very well but still more that could've been done.

Difficulty • 5/5 • As it stands (and going by how the original board game works), I'd say this is pretty much spot on.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this game. It gave me a little blast to the past of my childhood and this Sploder adaptation of the board game works very well. I can see clear effort put into this, even though it is only one level, because I can imagine how much of a pain it would be to make a CPU player like this with minimal loading time while working every time, so I'd agree with this game being featured. It's like the board game in the sense I could leave it right now (like putting a board game back in its box), play it again anytime and still enjoy it just as much. Thank you for reading this review and I apologise if it's not quite as good as my others; as stated at the beginning I didn't know how it'd go reviewing a game with one level but I don't think it went too badly in the end.