Jesse's 2014 IGMC Reviews

Jesse - PVGames · 2014-07-08T04:04:01+0900

Hello everyone! I have been gradually playing through a number of game entries for the contest and it amazes me how much talent there is in the game-making community. Since there are over 600 someodd entries, maybe some people might find my reviews useful - further, hopefully the developer's of the games reviewed will also find the information useful in some way. These reviews are just how I experienced the project in question and does not reflect the opinions of anyone other than me. Scoring Rubric: Scores - [0 = Worst game ever, 1 = Terribly disappointing, 2 = Not terrible, but far from being good or something I want to play for 1 hour+, 3 = Solid game, entertaining, has some shortcomings,4 = I would consider paying money for this game, 5 = Among the greatest games I have experienced.] A note about scoring: I tend not to just give out high scores. There are plenty of people who say things like "graphics were great, 5/5" and that might make the game-maker feel good, I feel like that is a pretty useless score and doesn't offer any real feedback. For most games, they rate around 3.something and that is NOT BAD at all. That means I felt the game was fun and engaging enough to warrant generally playing all the way through it, but there was still enough room for improvement. A score of 4 means I would consider putting down some hard-earned cash through Steam or something for the game, which is not something I generally do, so 4 is really, really impressive. I doubt anyone will get a 5/5 because a 5 is as high as it goes - this is the epitome of gaming, a complete and perfect experience. Very few games I would ever give 5's to even from big commercial developers (I would say Fallout 3, Final Fantasy 7/8, Ultima Online would get 5's from me). Similarly, I doubt many if any games would get a 0 or 1 because that means pretty much no effort at all went into the game and it is just a travesty. So, without further ado, here is the list of games I have played and their reviews (some of these I took from the 'Rate Each Game out of 5' thread, and any further reviews are posted here): Painted Heart - 2.5/5 Spoiler First and foremost the art is really good - that is the main thing the game has going for it. I also love the art for Agiel, she is the best one in the game visually and conceptually (love the eye thing on the inside of the wing). Now, going past the art and looking at the game-play and writing, well, there isn't as much to write home about. The battle system which they trump up as unique and such may well be that, unique, but I found it to be unnecessarily convoluted and just not fun (even on casual mode). Luckily there are not a ton of fights. There is no real game-play to the game itself - you just walk across the screen to go from one scene to the next, and maybe occasionally go up a ladder. That's pretty much it. The writing didn't do much for me at all and I often found it confusing and it left me wondering about what I was supposed to do a lot. The lack of auto-save proved to be the game's undoing for me as when I lost a battle a good part through the game, my last save was somewhere back in the first painting, so I stopped playing at this point and did not really want to bother to complete it. I also felt the entire introductory period of the game (credits, song, tutorials) took up WAY too much time - if the judges are going to sink about an hour into the game, probably not the best idea to waste the first 10-15 minutes with credits. Conclusion: I feel that Painted Heart could have a really promising future if the game-maker took it and really worked on the game-play mechanics to make the game actually fun to play, and worked on the writing to be more cohesive and interesting. If these two aspects of the game can be brought up the standard of its artwork, it would easily be a masterpiece. But right now, it falls short of its potential. The Farming One - 3.5/5 Spoiler I found the game-play to be pretty fun in the beginning, harvesting the radish and chopping wood. I liked that I could hire helpers to take over that duty and money will just roll in over time. I felt the money progression and cost progression of new things to be well scaled and reasonable. I felt the number of people returning to town was appropriate, though this did bring up some issues that hurt the score a little, I kept getting sandwiched by NPCs and had to wait for them to move out of the way... often. The dialogue and writing was light and fun, nothing super, but it was competently written and at times witty. I was unable to figure out the point of the whole gift-giving thing, as I gave 3 or 4 people all three gifts and nothing really happened aside from extra dialogue, which made it feel a bit like a waste of a large amount of money. I enjoyed that there were many different things to do and get, but ultimately they are all pretty much the same - click on this object to receive money/resource. I feel that this is more due to the fact…

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Started by Jesse - PVGames Jul 7, 2014, 07:04 PM 20 posts View original ↗