[EGD] Where's Creativity?
Lightning Crashes is a game created by beefburito
Welcome back again to another EGD review as we are plowing through the games here and giving each and every game the review that they deserve. Today we will be going through Lighting Crashes by Beefburito, yet another entry for EGD 7. I really had no idea of what to expect from him; I have only read a couple reviews from the former mentioned. The thumbnail of the game seemed quite bland and barren; nothing that would be of interest to me. It just seemed dull which dramatically lowered my expectations for this game. Still though, I shrugged onward. Don’t ever, never judge a book by its cover. That's a principle that I'll promise to always follow.
At first glance, Lightning Crashes offers nothing very intriguing. Much of its puzzles are prudent and completely comprehensible. None of the puzzles really challenged my mind and much of them consisted of slamming into switches and using the strength of the all mighty power glove in order to move wheels to forge a new path. This stuff has already been seen numerous times and I wouldn’t complain if it had a couple old and used puzzles that actually challenged the mind. It just brought nothing new or challenging to the table. I did take note that much of the puzzles consisted of running back and forth in order to hit a bunch of switches. Maybe if Lighting Crashes had included some puzzles in between these sequences, it would have been greatly improved in not only the puzzle department but also game-play wise. All in all, it still managed to keep me playing so to speak so I guess you can say the game did do its job by hooking the player in. It just as a strange addictiveness to it, and I'm sure beefyburito didn't sneak some nicotine into my beef. Moving on.
The day jetpacks were invented was the day that the prophecy of flying chickens came true. Lightning Chickens did a great job at keeping this prophecy. The levels, simply put, were fairly open which I liked in contrast to today’s crunched up and crammed puzzle games that are most usually seen on the featured page. In fact, I believe that the game is highly and truly reliant on the prophecy of flying chickens. The jetpacks are crucial to navigating the game’s levels. Because of this, you would have to conserve your rocket fuel conservatively for if you happened to run out of fuel at the wrong place at the wrong time, well, good luck to you if you are planning on beating this game. I also found myself being able to skip through vast parts of the game with the jetpack (which didn’t seem intended considering I even bypassed a bunch of obstacles and areas), so that’s probably a flaw in the level designs. This department all in all could've been better executed.
The gameplay in Lightning Crashes was as wild as mother nature. It had an unpredictable nature to it. On one end of the scale, it was pretty good. In some of the levels, although the puzzles were very simple, they were pretty good when mashed in with the decent enemy placement and well paced gameplay. On the other end of the scale or spectrum, the game was also boring on some parts. These parts specifically either had poor enemy placement or too little action. The boring scenes were the ones where you run around and hit switches; a brain dead task nonetheless. The lack of enemies didn't make this any more fun, and traps were virtually none existent in some parts of the game where they could've improved things up a notch. Considering both of the pros and the cons, the gameplay seems to balance out and at the end of the day, the pros seemed to slightly outweigh the cons.
The enemy placement was decent at best. It definitely could have been better. It’s not the worst I have seen; the enemies weren’t placed too sloppily. Some of them seemed to be placed with some thought behind their rather articulate positions but nothing went out on its way and screamed out perfection to me. The ones that were poorly placed were always the ones that were near ledges. They were just so frustrating, aggravating and agitating when they constantly threaten to push you off a ledge. Enemies are supposed to add challenge to the game, not threaten the player with the possibility of falling off a ledge into oblivion. Enemy placement sure has seen better times. I'll award enemy placement with a grade C cause some of the enemy placement was pretty good.
Lightning Crashes is a fair and fine entry for EGD. Sure, beefburito is a human, not an alien so therefore yea, he did do a couple miss ups here and there. The level design could’ve been more thought through, the puzzles were pretty unoriginal and the enemy placement was decent at best. Nevertheless, the game executed its elements rather fairly. It didn’t excel and go above and beyond but yet it’s not a bad title to play. I’d recommend this to anyone with a heck load of free time on their hands. Nonetheless, it’s time to sum all of this worthless writing up and get a score for this game:
Game-play: 6.5/10
Puzzles and Traps: 4/10
Fun Factor: 6/10
Enemy Placement: 5/10
Execution and Creativity: 6/10
Final Score: 27.5/50 (F) 55% Awesome
Judgment: It’s a cool game bro. Just do some sit ups and pack on some steroids and you’ll get a feature in no time. Whether this game is gonna get featured for EGD, I have no idea. But I do know one thing. The EGD featuring schedule is behind schedule, that’s for sure.