|
|
|
The Daily Click ::. Downloads ::. Review Review: Unknown Game 2458
What impressed me most about this game were the graphics. They have a good-looking alternative style, which is in a way similar to "Yoshi's Island" on the SNES in that most of the graphics appear hand-drawn. The style works very well, though there really is a lot of white used in the game. It's snow, after all, I suppose. As the title suggests, this is an isometric game. The engine is pretty good, in that there are usually no problems with objects appearing in front of/behind each other when they shouldn't. One thing I noticed was that the character doesn't move along the forward/back axis, but instead straight up and down the screen. This (the method used here) is a better way of doing the movement in my opinion. The objective is similar to Pac-Man: run around the level collecting tokens (in this case, seasonal Christmas trees are the item of choice) while avoiding the enemies. The enemies are pretty basic, only being able to move up and down for the most part. Once all trees are collected, you have to make your way to the flashing exit to be whisked away to the next level. To aid you in your quest to gather evergreen trees, you're also provided with "crystals" that can be picked up from the playfield. Pressing Shift launches a crystal from your character, a blue blob with a Santa hat, and if it collides with an enemy it vanishes with a sound that could loosely be described as "squink". They're helpful, as you get three chances to touch enemies before you die, but unfortunately rare as well, and have to be used carefully. Other items include keys to open doors which look like obelisks, snowballs which hover in the air and hurt you and extra hearts should you need them. Even by the second level things get pretty difficult. The main difficulty lies not in the difficulty of avoiding enemies (although there's a fair bit of that) but instead strategically deciding which ones to take out. To further complicate matters, the third level introduces multiple doors of the same colour, and you really have to think about which ones to unlock first to reach your objective. Thankfully there are no great feats of forward planning to be done, but it makes you think all the same. An auto-save feature is employed so that you can come back to a game later on, which is a nice touch. It's likely that you will come back to it as well, if only to see what the next level brings... As for music, it's appropriate to the Christmas theme and nicely synthy (MOD music is employed here). It's very well written, almost of CD quality, though I believe it's taken from elsewhere. This is a more than competent action-puzzler which a few years ago would even have been of commercial quality. A little more variety in the puzzles would have been nice, but as a lunch-break game I've not seen much that can beat it.
 Download This Game
|
  Superb   AdvertisementWorth A Click   |
