9 Reviews:
wakusei_iw
A long flowing trap game with a different style in all of them and a good style of pit, the two black edges at the top and bottom of the game surprised me.
recommend.
[1] Like
recommend.
Rating: 8.4 84
Difficulty: 46 46
Sep 18, 2022
Paragus
A really well produced trap game for the most part. I feel like the farther into the game you go the better it gets. Trap creativity is a mixed bag of sorts as they range from interesting to a fair amount of moving and surprise spike type of stuff. While the game is currently not complete, the later stages of the version released start to focus a bit less on traps and more on platforming. The bosses are fairly simple and fair, and overall this unfinished version has enough content in it to keep you busy for a while.
Tagged as: Trap
[1] Like
Rating: 7.0 70
Difficulty: 50 50
Jan 15, 2016
Cosmoing
As I was writing this review, I found it difficult to put into words exactly why I didn't enjoy this game. So I'm gonna try to list out positive and negative things I can think about instead.
On the positive side:
The game looks great! Every stage stands out from the rest and looks cohesive, there's even nice little details such as snow piling up on the correct side of spikes. The widescreen effect with the top and bottom black bars is something I also quite like seeing. And I like how you go between stages. It's not super unique but it looks interesting and feels cohesive in a weird way.
One of the later stages had really great traps and progression. It nearly always felt like the traps were there to change your route and make you perform fun platforming maneuvers which is a great way to use traps if you ask me. And the way the stage changed as you advanced was also great!
On the negative side:
Most of the other traps in the game ranged from either boring to very unpleasant. It didn't feel like there was any sort of thought put into these traps, just that the maker needed to hit a per-save trap counter and decided to make some spikes move. Where they are in the save feels completely random, ranging from all at the start to all over the place to all at the end. As the game goes on, it does change from just spikes to other things, but the concept remains the same and my thoughts too.
Although the game looks great visually with lots of detail, the audio side leaves a lot to desire. I know this isn't something a lot of people consider with most fangames and that's because you don't need to most of the time! 90% of fangames have very little in terms of audio requirements outside of the BGM. But when you have a fangame this reliant on traps, you really need to think about sound effects for these traps, otherwise your simple flying spike will remain a simple flying spike. In fact, I would argue good sounds is more important than good visuals in a trap game. A brown block or default spike visual is probably something most people don't even get bothered by nowadays, but I'm sure hearing sndSpikeTrap over and over again is probably a lot more grating to the average player. Even the simple addition of a custom sound on a trap is a lot more likely to make your players not feel annoyed but instead amused. All that to say this game uses very little in terms of non-standard sound effects which I think played a major part in why a lot of these traps felt frustrating.
A more minor complaint is the amount of backtracking through screens. And I know this is gonna sound like a weird thing to point out, but there's genuinely just so many screens where you get to the end and you have to go back through a large part of the screen again at least once for no good reason. Even in the first stage it stood out, and it didn't really get much better at the game went on.
There's also a couple small gameplay nitpicks I could make, such as the gravity flipping in the V6 stage being different if you're upside down or not, or saves not working while you're standing on them, or the gravity flippers in stage 2 obviously changing the room and not saving your position. These may seem like very small details, but in a game as visually good looking as this, these blemishes stand out like a sore thumb and started to wear on me as I discovered them.
I think I'm out of things to say. It's often difficult to peer inside your own mind and find out why you think what you think, so I apologize for the poor structure of this review. But I wanted to try to elaborate as much as possible on why this game left a poor taste in my mouth, especially since I was surprised myself by it.
[0] Likes
On the positive side:
The game looks great! Every stage stands out from the rest and looks cohesive, there's even nice little details such as snow piling up on the correct side of spikes. The widescreen effect with the top and bottom black bars is something I also quite like seeing. And I like how you go between stages. It's not super unique but it looks interesting and feels cohesive in a weird way.
One of the later stages had really great traps and progression. It nearly always felt like the traps were there to change your route and make you perform fun platforming maneuvers which is a great way to use traps if you ask me. And the way the stage changed as you advanced was also great!
On the negative side:
Most of the other traps in the game ranged from either boring to very unpleasant. It didn't feel like there was any sort of thought put into these traps, just that the maker needed to hit a per-save trap counter and decided to make some spikes move. Where they are in the save feels completely random, ranging from all at the start to all over the place to all at the end. As the game goes on, it does change from just spikes to other things, but the concept remains the same and my thoughts too.
Although the game looks great visually with lots of detail, the audio side leaves a lot to desire. I know this isn't something a lot of people consider with most fangames and that's because you don't need to most of the time! 90% of fangames have very little in terms of audio requirements outside of the BGM. But when you have a fangame this reliant on traps, you really need to think about sound effects for these traps, otherwise your simple flying spike will remain a simple flying spike. In fact, I would argue good sounds is more important than good visuals in a trap game. A brown block or default spike visual is probably something most people don't even get bothered by nowadays, but I'm sure hearing sndSpikeTrap over and over again is probably a lot more grating to the average player. Even the simple addition of a custom sound on a trap is a lot more likely to make your players not feel annoyed but instead amused. All that to say this game uses very little in terms of non-standard sound effects which I think played a major part in why a lot of these traps felt frustrating.
A more minor complaint is the amount of backtracking through screens. And I know this is gonna sound like a weird thing to point out, but there's genuinely just so many screens where you get to the end and you have to go back through a large part of the screen again at least once for no good reason. Even in the first stage it stood out, and it didn't really get much better at the game went on.
There's also a couple small gameplay nitpicks I could make, such as the gravity flipping in the V6 stage being different if you're upside down or not, or saves not working while you're standing on them, or the gravity flippers in stage 2 obviously changing the room and not saving your position. These may seem like very small details, but in a game as visually good looking as this, these blemishes stand out like a sore thumb and started to wear on me as I discovered them.
I think I'm out of things to say. It's often difficult to peer inside your own mind and find out why you think what you think, so I apologize for the poor structure of this review. But I wanted to try to elaborate as much as possible on why this game left a poor taste in my mouth, especially since I was surprised myself by it.
Rating: 4.0 40
Difficulty: 60 60
Nov 10, 2021