💎CYAN REVIEWS💎 - Mind's Desire

Review by cian009 on Friday, January 12th 2018

This review is part of my editor application, I was given 5 days to find a game that I consider feature worthy and write a review on it. I�ve searched far and wide, finally settling on a game made by my good friend Startrekzooka titled Mind�s Desire. Get your snacks, sit back, and enjoy the review.

Introduction

The ship shooter is the oldest game creator on the site, it was first released back in 2007 which is almost 11 years ago and seems to have aged quite well. Despite being so old, many games are still being made with the creator which I�m glad to see, as it�s one of my favourites. There are still new, cool games being made and ideas discovered with the creator, and games from the likes of member�s such as Startrek confirm this. Startrek has been a member of the sploder community for 7 years and in that time he�s earned himself 8 features, with 4 of them being made with the ship shooter. From his previous features, he shows great knowledge of the shooter creator and knows how to make fun action sequences and puzzles. I�ve been a fan of Startrek�s games for a while, and I�m always excited when he releases a new one.

Review

From playing Startrek�s other shooter games, I�ve concluded that he is very skilled with the creator, so I had pretty high hopes for Mind�s Desire. The thumbnails in Startrek�s games usually capture a small part of the game. The overall thumbnail is visually appealing and shows off how the game will look. It�s safe to say that Startrek puts a lot of effort into making his games look nice. However, he has done something different with his thumbnail for Mind�s Desire. This time around, instead of showing off a segment from the game, he�s used his artistic ability to produce a marvellous looking thumbnail. The title of the game is �Mind�s Desire�, to desire something means to strongly want it. The thumbnail fits this definition perfectly as it depicts a man holding on to the edge of a cliff, with the caption �Never Let Go�.

From the outset of the game, I could already tell that I was in for a treat. It�s clear that startrek has a passion for making the worlds in his games look beautiful and interesting to look at, and Mind�s Desire is no exception. Startrek takes advantage of the polygons in the creator and is able to use the limited colours to make recognisable shapes and objects, such as the bench and the garden. The game starts with the player outside their house, as they walk to the end of the lawn and exit the front gate. He uses the mud poly to slow the player down as a way to ease them into the game. There a messages reminding you to never give up, and to reassure the player that they can do this. This ties well into the name of the game.

The game as a whole is very different to the typical shooter game you might see on the featured page. Instead of paths connecting rooms together in a sort of 1 directional route, Startrek has gone for an Open World approach to the shooter. The world that Startrek created is one big rectangle filled with many rooms and some secrets. I�m a big fan of Open World games, and I would like to see more people use the shooter creator in this way. There is one downside to making open world games, and that is trying to make sure the player knows where to go. Startrek handles this by giving hints with the message boxes and uses white arrows on the floor to point the player where they need to go next. A problem I faced when playing this game for the first time, was trying to figure out where to start. I felt lost at first, but it was fun to explore the map and find the different secrets. It wasn�t that big of an issue though, since once I got started, everything began to fall in place.

I really liked that the game encouraged exploration, there was a lot of health pickups throughout the map and secret switches that opened power-up crates. Another problem with Open World shooters, is that the creators tend to make the maps too big and don�t have enough content to fill it, but this was not the case with Mind�s Desire. I found that the map was a perfect size for the amount of content in the game, it was very easy to learn where everything was, and I never felt like I didn�t know where I was going. In the game, Startrek mentions that he intended to create a motivational game, but ended up making an Open World and using it as a medium for his art. Startrek placed random message boxes around the map that had words such as �Afraid�, �Pressure� and �Anxiety�. These negative words helped motivate me to beat the game as I felt I needed to prove that I wouldn�t let these words intimidate me.

Rating

Conclusion

To conclude the review, Mind�s Desire is an Open World exploration game made using the classic ship shooter creator. It has astonishing visuals and fun action sequences. I would highly recommend this game to anyone, whether you�re a fan of the shooter creator or not. It doesn�t require much prior knowledge to the creator and is fun and easy to play. With all said and done, I strongly believe that Mind�s Desire by Startrekzooka deserves a spot on the featured page. It is clear that he put a lot of time and effort into making this game, with the beautiful art work and large Open World map, the game was fun to play and I think Startrek deserves another feature. I�m sure he has more games planned for the future and I can�t wait to play them when they�re released.