darkly77 tarafından yazılan son incelemeler

It's pretty meh, especially compared to the incredible Guardian of Light. Has potential here, but held back by SO many confusing choices, each a misstep that GoL had already got right:


Ultimately, it feels like there were too many bad decisions, plus an overall lack of cohesion. The game really feels the sum of a lot of disjointed parts. And seriously, loot boxes??

It's just a shame because if the game respected the player more, this could have been a great experience. But it doesn't care if you want to collect everything on a level, or if you don't want to grind for gems to unlock loot boxes that give random buffs, or even if you want to know where you are in the world. If feels heartless, in a game that's fragmented nature already left it feeling soulless.

It's OK, 6/10. I adored the original game, Cryptark, and there's nothing quite like it. It was niche but totally original.

But among the saturated FPS market, there's not enough in Gunhead that stands out. It feels like the devs wanted to make a mass-appeal game, but didn't account for the masses sticking to what they know, while the ones most likely to play this are those who are looking for something really special.

There's a few issues particular to the game too. Others have covered most of them, but what really put me off was the abundance of weapon purchase choices. You don't unlock stuff, you choose what to unlock instead, but there's a few dozen guns to pick from. It's too much choice at once. I just wanna shoot stuff and zip around in my mech. I don't know which gun is best.

I also don't know why most of the ship is shrouded by distant fog, or why all the colours blend into themselves. It makes the whole game feel murky and samey. Every so often there's splashes of vibrant colour, then it's back to purple-grey, or green-grey, or blue-grey. Cryptark was crisp and gorgeous, but you can see from this game's screenshots how cloudy everything looks here. It just makes the game look ugly.

Some of the alarm system combos can get pretty annoying too, like one that heals others alongside one that swaps their position, It can make the gameplay less like a frantic struggle that pays off as your skills improve, and more like a series of frustrations that have you resigning to defeat against the RNG gods.

But it's still pretty good. The flaws are't game-breaking, they're just enough that I couldn't get hooked. I might come back and play some more, but I'm done for now.

One of the all-time greats, a game I still see others compared against often.

And it's still fantastic, with fast fluid combat, plenty of player choice, and a simplicity that makes it always accessible.

The graphics and GUI leave a lot to be desired, but that's part of its charm, and the simpler graphics often make it easier to play.

Plus it's often on sale at -50%. Too good to miss.

Boring, 5/10. Gets repetitive fast, mainly because all the tracks mostly look the same. Sure, there's different stuff in the background, but ultimately you're staring at long stretches of solid orange or blue.

The racing itself is fine, I didn't like that cars can flip over but YMMV. But it doesn't feel rewarding. I only play arcade racers, not sims, but there still needs to be some depth, some skills to learn. Here, you're either good or you're not, and both are dull.

There's a ton of cars, but most of them are just worse versions of whatever you have atm. Hot Wheels fans will probably like it, but to the average gamer it's just pointless filler.

And the major thing that stopped me playing: The godawful menu for choosing a car. You can only see like 6 at once, you can only scroll 1 at a time, and there's a delay after each scroll. So it requires way too long to browse through your full collection. It should have been a grid with multiple pages. Instead, the approach they went with makes choosing cars repetitive and dull... just like the rest of the game.

Fun but short. Well worth trying, as it's free.

Fantastic, such a great way to showcase demos and trailers. Brings me back to the days of OPM demo discs, and especially the Windows 95 space station demo disc!

Would love to see more like this. Doesn't even have to be as high budget, just a collection of demos. That's what was great about demo discs, it's a lucky bag of stuff you might like. Nowadays you have so many decisions to make and have to find everything yourself, so discovering new games (especially ones that aren't in headlines) can take hours of research.

I'd love to download bundles of hand-picked games and just see what's fun by playing.

It's pretty good, 7/10. The only major innovation here is 3D, but being in 3D does have a huge impact. Everything feels crunchier. It feels like an AAA treatment of the horde survival genre.

The 3-team squad thing is pretty cool but it's just a way to lock in your weapon and special ability choices. Ultimately, if you've played a lot of horde survival games, the gameplay loop will be pretty familiar.

After around 5 hours (including time with the demo), I felt like I'd seen most of what the game offers. I could play for longer and grind out the meta progression, but there's not much else to do yet. So personally I think that it's worth the $10 asking price, considering other finished games in the same genre go for half that and have a lot more content (eg. Time Wasters). I also wonder if they're scaring off fans of the genre with the higher cost.

That said, I've enjoyed my time with it overall, and I've played and LOVED another game by this dev (Fury Unleashed), which is bursting with creativity. So I believe in the developers, and I'm sure what's on offer so far is just a taste of things to come. I've seen a lot of EA games go from basic to outstanding, and this could turn out to be another one of those. Just keep in mind that your purchase now might be more of a long-term investment than an immediate payoff.

Boring, 3/10. Should be in early access until the dev adds more content. Atm you've seen everything this game has to offer within 5 mins.

This is one of the rare negative reviews that actually enjoys the auto runner controls.

The auto running can be pretty fun, if you let yourself forget that this is the sequel to one of the best platformers of all time. It's sometimes boring, and often annoying, but it's a different game to the original, and focusing on jump timings instead of speed and momentum introduces a whole new feel for the game.

But beyond that, the gameplay is a very mixed bag, with level design and difficulty that's all over the place: My first world was brutal, second felt fair, and third was ridiculously easy. But that could be forgiven if it wasn't for 2 massive issues.

The first is that the timings of many chunks is way too precise. In SMB, the controls were simple, but with every retry you could do something different: Change your speed, your jump angle, your air control... But here, you have 1 button. So if you get stuck, you're doing exactly the same thing over and over, and it's exhausting, because the only difference is pressing that button 0.1s sooner or later.

This is especially true for the Dark World, where passing them can feel like a fluke. If you don't have speedrunner levels of control and timing, you're going to get stuck in this trap of endless death loops where you feel like you're doing the exact same thing repeatedly. But then, if you finally pass the the troubling part, that's just the first segment of a chunk! So you need to figure out the timings of the next one immediately, inevitably die, and then you're back to trying to pass that first part all over again. There's "git gud", and then there's playing to absolute frame perfection, in quick succession, which is what too many of these chunks, especially in the Dark World, demand.

The second major problem is with the chunks being random. Instead of a tailor-made experience with a difficulty curve that feels intuitive and levels that feel iconic, you get stitched-together levels that mix incredibly difficult chunks with others that feel either easy or tedious. There's just no flow to each level. It's not helped by chunks with long sections that end in cheap deaths, where dying means doing the same thing repeatedly just to try the final tricky jump again. This is highlighted by the Dark World levels, which are just more random chunks, rather than variations of a classic level you've already trained yourself on.

Compare this with the original, where even if there's a hard part, every retry improves your skills: The further you go, the faster you become, the better your reflexes, the more you know about how much distance and control your jumps and movement have. But by forgoing manual movement, learning to beat one chunk quickly doesn't teach you anything, other than how to beat that one chunk. There's no transferable skills that you're honing with each success and failure.

It's made worse by how long the levels are: After a few hours, hitting a difficulty wall feels like a slog, because it's just tedious challenge after tedious challenge, with no breaks, and no feeling of relief once you get over the hard part. It's just onto the next chunk, and potentially headfirst into the next wall.

And because levels are made of strung-together chunks, if you can't beat one chunk, then you can't beat the entire level. I have one level where I legitimately can't see a way to beat it, and there's a lot of hard chunks in that level, before the unbeatable one, so trying again means having to go through the whole thing all over again. This is not fun. As mentioned above, the original SMB already solved this problem by keeping levels short and focused. If you wanted to retry a challenging part in SMB, you're there within seconds. Not so with SMBF.

The A+ times are super annoying too, as getting them is needed to unlock the Dark World levels. Sometimes you'll beat them with 5 seconds left, other times you'll only just crack the time with a fraction of a second remaining. It rarely feels like you're trying to best a time that was set by someone who ultimately wants you can beat it; no, it feels like you're fighting against a machine.

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The real shame is that there's potential for a very enjoyable game here. Behind the disjointed difficulty, overly precise timings, and failures of the randomness, there's some great level design and interesting mechanics, and I've had a lot of fun with them. But they focused on the wrong thing, adding a ton of level chunks without ensuring the player gets to see the best of them. Are they really ALL so good that they should be randomised? I've played enough of them, and the answer is a definite no.

They should have stuck to shorter, hand-crafted levels, ensuring that the base game is fun, using the absolute best chunks to really showcase what the game is capable of. Then offered the roguelike, randomised worlds as add-on content or a bonus mode.

It's also not helped by the annoying bosses, which feel too drawn out. If the point of the "5000+ levels" was to add replayability, they really had to nail the bosses (which never change), else nobody would want to replay the game. But they failed hard here, and facing one feels like a slog, rather than an exciting challenge that you'll want to replay endlessly.

Plus:

- The music is repetitive and dull.
- There's no option to restart a level from the pause menu (the mapped buttons don't work).
- You have to watch a cutscene every time you change worlds (and see its completion %).
- Character unlocks have weirdly vague descriptions, and only change your skin.
- Collectibles (mostly) also require those vague challenges, so feel pointless.

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So, should you play SMB Forever? If you like autorunners, cheap deaths, levels that seem to be legitimately unbeatable, and you don't mind all the other caveats I've covered, then yes! There's a good enough amount of stuff to like here. But definitely not at full price. The vast majority of players won't get $20 worth of playtime from this.

Just keep in mind that, despite its extremely long development time, it's still an unpolished mess of a game. I've had fun, but I've also had a fair bit of boredom, lots of disappointment, and a huge amount of pointless frustration.

Note: I also have about 2 hours on the EGS version.

9/10. Absolute GEM of a game that really deserves to be on a youtuber's "indie games you've never heard of" list.

If you love platformers and like light puzzles, pick this up! The puzzles aren't too hard, it's definitely more platformer than puzzler. Which I really appreciate, I suck at puzzles but still like to feel clever when I solve them. And this game lets you do that, it's fun all the way through, always feels rewarding, and the difficulty curve is perfect.

I got this as the original "Uurnog" for free as a Humble Original, then got this upgraded version later. So I've played through the game 3 times, about 10hrs each. There's plenty of replayability because:

a) The gameplay is just super fun, with lots of unique mechanics and always new things to discover,
b) It allows for lots of creative player expression, with just the right amount of silliness,
c) You can put a bird in a box then put that box in another box with a gun and a gem then put that box in another box and that never got old.

It's legit one of my faves of all time, a joyful comfort game that I'll inevitably return to again.

It's on sale a lot so you can probably pick it up for under £5, which is more than worth it.