It Doesn't Really Work.

Review by darut1234 on Thursday, July 18th 2013

1/5

Fun fact: This is my second time attempting to publish a review for this game. The first time I attempted, I hit submit on this review, which was - keep in mind - really really long and in-depth about everything about this game and the situation surrounding it that lead to it's release, and apparently I was logged out when I hit "Submit review" and I lost ALL OF IT. Angry doesn't even begin to describe it.

So, I'm not going to try to re-write that entire review. Instead I'm going to share with you a few highlights:

1: The game is bad. I feel bad for saying it, because on a website where people can create games titled "JUSTEN BIEBER bleepS LOLOLOLZL" and get thousands of views, it's nice to see people at least try. There are glimpses of creativity seen in the game, pretty much all of which involve the rather interesting way it often uses the switch polygon.

But the game is absolutely crippled by the lag. The lag begins from the moment you click the "Start mission" button, stays around even when you aren't shooting anything, and makes it absolutely impossible to enjoy anything. Odysseus is a massive game - judging from the screenshots Xploder posted before it's release, and by the fact that the time limit is 20 freaking minutes - but the game is so big that you'd need a supercomputer to play it through to the end.

2: No, I didn't actually play the game through to the end. Some might say that because of this I didn't give this game the chance that it deserves, and normally I might agree with you, but seeing as the lag was the thing that completely crippled this game from the start and there's no way it can get any better (And seeing as there's every reason to believe that it would only get worse the longer you played the game), combined with the fact that the lack of any usernames in the top score section leaves me with no reason to believe that this endlessly long game is even possible, leaves me feeling pretty comfortable in the knowledge that I don't have to play every little detail of it to know what it's about.

3: Ship games can't be 20 minutes. I'm sorry, but even when you ignore the lag there's nobody in their right mind who's going to want to play a 20 minute game all over again if they die just inches away from winning. Other makers can get away with it because of the way that they implement checkpoint systems and lag less, but in Ship games it just doesn't work.

4: The Epic Game Drop is dumb, and needs to stop. Seriously, it was a bad idea even when we started it about five years ago, because releasing about thirty games at once is the best way to make your game not stand out at all among the countless other games, but at least when it was started it could be called the "Epic Game Drop", because it was, for the most part, limited to the game makers who were considered at the time to be some of the best game makers on the site. Now that any random game maker can just wander in and plop their random game on that date, it's not so much "Epic Game Drop" as it is "Mediocre Game Drop". Not to mention how stupid and arbitrary it is to prevent pretty much any game that isn't in the drop from getting featured or reviewed during that time (If Geoff ever actually said that he's okay with this whole dumb tradition basically taking over the main site I'd be incredibly surprised).

Bottom line, Odysseus: Young Tridents is a boring, frustrating slog of a game and isn't worth your time. I'm finding it hard to believe that Xploder even bothered to play it himself before he published it (Again, he has yet to beat it himself), and the game is broken to the point of being beyond fixing. It's not quite at the circle of hell reserved for games such as "Glass of Coke" and "Fluffy", but it's still a rather epic misfire of a game in it's own right.