I decided to judge a few of the entries on the front page. A few of them drew my eye for both positive and negative reasons; however, a few of them really did surprise me.
The Bite of the Darkness (0/5)
I decided to give this a shot. With the retro-style and promises of humour, I was hoping that this would be some sort of macabre Monkey Island game. I was thoroughly disappointed. I couldn't play long, largely due to translation problems - most of it was still in Spanish outside of main dialogue making combat incredibly difficult and confusing. Whilst the graphics were alright and the story seemed to have some potential, I had to give up in the first combat scene because of the language barrier. I double-checked the rules of submission and it does state that non-English games must have a suitable translation, and since chunks of the game were still in Spanish, that's a disqualification from me, I'm afraid.
What I do feel is this game would be much better with a proper translator on board the team. That's my suggestion for improvement!
Eden (4/5)
What surprised me is that a puzzle game appeared on the front page. I'll be honest, I'm usually quite hesitant about fan-made puzzle games, and I have my own little formula of judging them. Is it original? Well, Eden sure is original. I've never come across an environmental, tile-based terraforming puzzle game before. It's simple interface and controls complemented the rather deep puzzling element to it. There was a slight bug with a white tile, but it was not a game-breaking issue. So the second part of this formula is to ask whether I find it addicting. I did. At the start, I was confused as to how the different tiles interacted but after adjusting to the steep learning curve, I managed to work it all out. Perhaps an improvement is necessary for the tutorial but nothing too ground-breaking. However, I did managed to waste at least an hour or so with this game and I certainly don't regret it. I think it's definitely something that should be ported to the mobile gaming industry, certainly.
A few things could be improved for this: iron out the slight issue with a white tile, improve the tutorial a bit, and add in more levels! If you do all that, it's the perfect puzzle game for me.
Vikings attack (2/5)
I was drawn to this one because of the controversies surrounding it. However, I will do my best to really discuss the game without the bias of those issues; honestly, the hype seems beyond me. The art style is just perfect. If this was a gaming art contest, I certainly would rate is 5/5, and that's where a large portion of those two points come from. The art. It's gorgeous. I loved it. It felt like rainbows. But since this is a game contest, I need to take more than that into account. Is it fun? No. I'll be honest, the tutorial system was rather confusing as it felt like all the information was being thrown at me. It suffered the same problem as Eden in that respect. However, unlike Eden, Vikings Attack was far more complex in terms of controls. There was no user interface, I wasn't sure which weapons were weapons and which upgrades were upgrades - and I didn't know how I could use them or what I had to do to unlock them if they were locked. The problem of a bad user interface is that it's game-breaking, so unfortunately I couldn't really enjoy this.
( Now back to playing more games! Hopefully I can be optimistic without nostalgia. )
( EDIT: oh, rate them out of five? one second )
