Review #3: Bones Is Back

Review by thunderboom on Saturday, February 8th 2014

Hello there universe of sploder. As I'm in a jolly mood, I'm making an attempt to review a platformer. If you know me, I hate most platformers, especially puzzle plats. But this game striked me. Now I'm here, giving you a review of a platformer that is named: Sherlock Bones 2 Conspirators - by the member, blackhole2. Or: Blackhole, BH or Hole2 for short.

Pre-thoughts

Just as this game caught my eye on the feature page, I thought: 'Sherlock Bones? The return? This must be good'. As I went to click the game, the thumbnail deviously caught my glowing blue eye. This scene reminded me of a type of evolution time where everything was very pre-historic and vines, mud, rivers are packed into that scene. It looked as if there were a few secrets hidden amongst some of the stuff. I could also spot an NPC that looked confused. This gave the impression that he'd lost something in the water or in the mud, idk. If you zoomed out, you'd be mostly likely to find not much action but a lot of puzzles. There are plenty hidden places, by the looks of it! As for the actual member side of this all, I have known BH for a long time on sploder and have been admiring his work. Not only has he got good platformer work, his graphic work blends in quite nicely with his skills. It's nice to see someone who's good at graphics and platformers, something you don't see every day. BH is a very nice member and his work is quality. As a result, I expected this game to be high standards. The first game of this was astonishing, I just didn't get too far.

Game-play

To start, I found lag... [Dramatic Music] To be serious though, I did sort of expect it as the objects in the level were mostly active and a lot of objects were squeezed into the level. I just had to be patient - Meaning, my laptop only got thrown out the window...um... 21304433092395 times? I didn't let the lag ruin the game even though there wasn't much of it. The main plot of the game was well planned. Like the first game, the game made you felt like you was actually someone like Sherlock Holmes on a case. The short and snappy description below the game acted as a blurb on the back of a book - It summarised the game but not into much detail. There are story elements throughout the game that release a small section of what's happening, every now and then. As for accidental glitching, this game had pushed out all possible accidental glitches. You may not know, but I'm a pro on finding glitches and this game certainly proved that fact wrong. I did not finish this game but as I could see, from the leader board, it is a reasonably long game that takes concentration and a lot of patience to master. For this section, the enjoyment of the game-play was exceptionally fun for me but the amount of lag in this game brought it down - even though it could've, possibly, been less laggy.

Hazards/Traps

Secondly, the traps sprung out on you a lot of them time. The rest of the time, you'd get a few few brief clues that left you hanging thinking what it meant... Suddenly, in comes the trap - the trap door of dooooooooom. But what do you expect? This is a puzzler/mystery type you know, Holmes could tell you that easily. As for hazards, nothing much really stood out. You could easily see them coming. Especially as you name a well after a dooming name. Because after you see a sign say 'Well Of Hell', your going to expect a giant rainbow with unicorns prancing down there. Logic. Some enemies you'd bump into, just shoot and carry on. Some are big - some are small. I'm not using a metaphor for that there as Thunder has a weird mind...

Puzzles

So far, this games gone very well for a plat; from me. After experiencing the game, I knew that the amount of puzzles included in the game were just right: not too much, not lacking. It's just like you bump into one every now and then, complete it and just carry on as normal. Some of the puzzles I've actually never seen before - I, actually, probably have but BH put them in a different form: pretty clever tbh. I also liked how these puzzles ranged in difficulty. Some took a while, some took less time. As a mystery game, the puzzles were excellent and they were pretty enjoying - even though I hate a lot of plat puzzles lol.

Difficulty

Now, I got this sorted - Because the difficulty said 10 before you click start, this game is very hard. Simple. In all honesty, the difficulty was the part that made the game a blast to play. As I said in the previous review, as I recall, you can get a decent depth into the game to get the gist of it. Sneakily, blackhole done this to be evil. He knew that we'd get far into it, think we'd do well and die. Unlike PPG, it's not level restart; it is game restart. The first fault of Plat. So, this section of the game was the following: sneaky, sly, clever, evil, bitter, smart, well-thought, etc, random critisi- Let's carry on.

Scenery

Next, we'll talk about the scenery side of town. The range of scenery objects was above standard. It's nice to see a member experimenting with the scenery to create new parts of scenery that look fresh. While we're on the subject of 'Range', I did appear to find that was a range in the organisation of scenery - Meaning, some was messy and some was neat. This was done purposely to make the scene more realistic for the person playing's experience. The home-made graphics that BH used also gave it more realism, they were up to scratch. Some didn't go into Gerald's type of detail but not type the flappy bird detail either. They seemed as they'd taken around an hour to make or possibly more, which is pretty good.

Creativity

Apart from the fact that BH ripped off Sherlock's name, I liked the creativity to a huge extent. Unlike many plats, Sherlock Bones 2 Conspirators covered many areas of genres. I found genres such as: mystery, action, puzzle and RPG. But there's probably a couple I missed. The scenes were really creative and required a deep thinking an imagination to create. As well as the actual depth of the game, it's addictive - not flappy bird kind of addictive. It's the sort of addictive where you need to carry on. Nice thinking BH.

Ratings

Final Score

At last, we are ready to reveal the final score to the public. Voting is now closed. Any further votes will not be counted but may still be charged.... An astonishing score of... 26/30! Congrats to the game: Sherlock Bones 2 Conspirators

Feature Worthy?

Hell yeah, this game has already earned what it deserves. It's totally worthy of owning a feature. I hope it becomes a very very successful game.

Conclusion

In all, I must say this overwrites the first one with quality. I'm also proud to say that it has urged me to play more plats. It's actually, in fact, one of the best plats I've ever experienced. So, if you don't like plats, go out and play this because this game will probably change your whole opinion on plats. Just like mine. I'd love to see more games like this in the future as we all would. It sure could have more added/changed things but what stuck out most is the huge range of genres. Lovely work BH. I'd also like to mention that this is the first ever plat I've reviewed and really struggled lol. I'll be seeing you guys in my next review but for now, au revoir.