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Review by meowmeowfurrycat on Saturday, October 31st 2015
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Click to play Life in POW Camp

Life in POW Camp is a game created by jackjoshseb

When writing or reading a review, capitalization is everything.


For the record, the last review on this site was twenty-five days ago. Under no circumstances is that a good thing � central to this website as games are, one might think that reviews for those games would be written more often. Certainly more than once a month. Kudos to me, then, for snapping us out of our daze � for today, this humble reviewer will tackle an excellent game � and hopefully restore some excitement to game making!


This game, according to its description, is based on actual events occurring right here in our forums; the game itself is made by none other than jackjoshseb. He's easily one of the best game makers on this site (over fifty featured games!) and here are the facts: In the sixth month of this year he was put into a "prisoner of war camp" for breaking some rules; while in this camp he was unable to do anything else on the site. Seeing that he had no other recourse left to him, he returned to game making and created the game being reviewed right now � but was it worth the effort?


I'd like to mention something before really getting into the review: the game is a classic ship game, presented in such a manner as to more easily convey the chain of events leading to jackjoshseb's imprisonment; now onward!


Hardly a moment passes in this game without some sort of engaging action sequence or plot device. Along the narrow path are visuals made of polygons to better imagine the story, as well as ambushes. Very well executed for the most part � this reviewer, at least, got a clear sense of how the protagonist experienced the events. Entering the story was easy as walking through a door (and the combination of graphics and text did a very good job of absolving jackjoshseb of his guilt).


Now for those who are wondering (and bad at shooters), here's a quick overview of what happened: on tinychat.com, a chat website *not affiliated with this one*, jackjoshseb met ironmonkey, a banned member. Over the course of their discussion, the latter convinced the former to give him the password to an alternate account "to make a speech" � and even though this shouldn't have caused any trouble as the alt didn't have any content on it, jackjoshseb was put into imprisonment.


Really though, how's the actual gameplay � what we should by all means be judging the game on? Even jackjoshseb can't be perfect on this one. Granted, the action is solid � a mix of small and large rooms, nice assortments of enemies, just enough health to keep pushing on � but sometimes it felt really sloppy to me. Reaching for the perfect way to tell a story, the game's creator turned off that little "snap to grid" button. Even though that makes it much easier to draw shapes, they now also look amateur and clumsy. That, more than anything, threw me off while playing this. (Since lag is an issue, the game is split into two parts, the second of which is only reachable as a link upon completing the first; there's nothing wrong with this idea � it's what this humble reviewer would do if he were in that situation � but the second half feels out of place, more rigid, more glitch/puzzly and that's not necessarily a good thing.)


More than anything, though, this game was a very enjoyable experience. Maybe you should spend time on the forums before playing it just to get a sense of what jackjoshseb is referring to, but it's not necessary. Feeling sloppy wasn't enough to discourage me from playing it all the way through (a couple points also glitched me out of the map, but that's neither here nor there). Center stage, as always, are jackjoshseb's veteran shooter skills, and they helped this game flow very nicely.


Presenting games with a score or rating isn't normally my style, but trying them out this once shouldn't hurt. Overused? � certainly, but if done well they're not an issue. Well, let's see how this game did:


20/20 for story

05/05 for scenery

15/20 for gameplay

50/56.25 is this game's grand total, or about eighty-nine percent � a b plus, which is a really good score as far as this reviewer is concerned � and he looks forward to hearing your thoughts; have a good day! ;)