Tag: rocks

Review: Hypnospace Outlaw (PC – Steam) ~ Dreaming Up Nostalgic Investigations

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Steam store page – Wikipedia – Official website

So, when I’m writing this, it is 2024. I turned 31 years old back in February. I still love playing video games and surfing the internet since I was a young lad. Besides that, I also have a fascination for anything that has to do with dreams and their meanings. And then a game called Hypnospace Outlaw turns up on my radar. A game that promises to bring back the early years of the internet that I remember. Not only that, we are going to have to moderate the internet with a new technology that allows people to surf the internet while they are dreaming. We have to play as an unnamed enforcer to keep the internet safe and on top of that, we can create our own pages and mod this game easily. But before we start spending time on that, let’s find out if the base game is actually good and if it’s worth to start playing this game or if it’s something we should skip. Also, feel free to leave your thoughts and/or opinions on this article and/or the game in the comment section down below. Besides, dear enforcer and MerchantSoft, this isn’t harassment, this is a fair review/critique of the game. Removing this from HypnoOS isn’t the solution.

Dreaming Up Nostalgic Investigations

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In this game, you play as an unnamed enforcer for MerchantSoft. A company that developed a headband that allows users to surf the web in their dreams. Your goal is to clean up the HypnoSpace for everybody. You start in late 1999, where your first case is assigned. When your first case is assigned, you are left to your own devices, and you can explore the internet by yourself. And let me tell you, there is a lot of internet to explore.

The story of this game is fascinating. You get to dive and explore through various pages on the internet about various things. A long time before social media was a thing and everybody had a website for their own creations. The HypnoSpace has several zones, with each their own theme. If you remember AOL, you will know what I’m talking about.

If you want to get the most out of this game, I highly advise you to take your time with this game. Don’t rush it at all. This game is sadly rather short if you only follow the main story of the game. It’s only 6 hours long and shorter if you know what you are doing. I mean, the speedruns are only around 11 minutes. The strength of this game is the depth it has. This game has three main chapters, and there are clear triggers that separate the chapters.

The deeper you dig and the more you read up, the more interesting lore gets revealed. I actually started a second playthrough to try and find the things I missed. And honestly, this game is one that gets ruined by playing it with a guide in any sort or form. Do not play this game with a guide. It’s a lot less rewarding if you play it with a guide in your first or second playthrough. The wonder of getting lost in all of these pages is just so nostalgic.

Now, while I was playing, I was wondering if it would appeal to the younger players out there. I’m somewhat on the fence about that. While it tackles a lot of subjects that are still somewhat relevant, I honestly think that it’ll mostly click with those who grew up with the internet of the ’90 to early ’00. With that said, I think that it still might click with the younger people, but know that the internet was very different back then.

Point-And-Click Detective

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This game is a point-and-click adventure game in any sense of the word. You get a case, and you have to explore the internet to see if anyone broke the rules or not.

Each infraction you find, will reward you with HypnoCoin. You can use these coins to buy various things in the Hypnospace. This can go from stickers, wallpapers, themes, applications to so much more. But be careful, it’s quite possible that some of these downloads are infected with malware. And back then, malware was a lot more visual and less aimed at serving you a lot of ads or stealing your information.

The controls of this game are quite easy. You mostly click with your mouse and input things sometimes in the search bar. If you know how to do basic things with a computer, you’ll very quickly find your way around with this game as well. While I sometimes struggled with opening apps, I didn’t have too much trouble with the controls. Thankfully, there are some options to tweak the controls to your liking, like disabling that double-clicking opens apps. But, I’m a Windows user and the double click to open apps is just hardwired in my brain.

Visually, this game really looks like you are playing with the old internet. When I noticed that there was a mod that changed the OS into Windows 95, oh boy, I was sold. There are various themes for the OS in this game, and they go from amazing to silly. There is even a fast food theme. Now, if you read that this game is mostly created by a team of 5 people, it’s even more impressive. Not only that, one of the main designers of Dropsy is part of the team.

The creativity of this game never ceased to amaze me. Let me continue on the trend of the visuals and say that the little details on how the webpages look is just so realistic. The little typo’s here and there, the rabbit holes you can jump down, the crazy visuals on various pages… Even the “help me, I can’t remove this” and “Test 1 2 3″… I made me crack up and remember my early days when I used to write webpages in plain HTML with barely any coding knowledge as a young teen.

While I knew that wiggling the mouse sped up the loading of the webpages, I just never really did. I just enjoyed the webpages loading slowly and having that experience again when I was a teenager before Facebook or any other big social media started to take over. Yes, even before MySpace. While I only experienced the late “pre-social media internet”, I do have amazing memories of it.

On top of that, you have the amazing wallpapers and sticker packs you can buy and play around with. With this, you can really make your desktop your own. But, something that really triggered memories for me were the viruses you can encounter. Back as a young teen, I was a lot less careful in what I downloaded and seeing the visual mess some viruses can create in this game, it triggered some nasty memories.

Memories like how one time, I got a very nasty variant of the SASSER worm and each time I installed something new, my computer would lock up and crash. Yes, even when you tried to re-install Windows, it locked up and crashed the installer. After a lot of digging, I found that it was caused by a program starting with boot and I had to screw out my hard drive, connect it with somebody’s computer and then remove the start-up file from there. I also had a piece of malware that looked like the ButtsDisease virus in this game. Where it started to change all the text on a webpage to another word. Oh man, those were the days.

So, during your investigations you can encounter various things. Things like people breaking the rules, and you have to report those. You mostly need to focus on one of 5 categories. Copyright infringement, harassment, illegal downloads/malware, extra illegal commerce and illegal activity. Each law gets several infractions, and you do have to look for them. At one moment, I really that to take notes. I really have to say, taking notes for this game is really helpful, you even have the notes’ app in HypnoOS.

Sticking in your brain

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Now, something I have to commend the developers for in this game is that they also took accessibility into account. Something I have to commend the developers for as well is the amount of content in this game, even when the main story is extremely short. I already talked about the visuals and how much I love them, but the music in this game is something else.

Some of the music tracks are really stuck in my mind and I wouldn’t be surprised that if I ever write another article in my favorite game music series, some of them will pop up in that. Some tracks are real earworms and got stuck in my brain. The music for some of the parody products in this game is so good, that I wish they were real.

The music in this game is a mixture of various styles, and I find some of them more catchy than the others, but it’s really impressive at how many styles there are in this game. If you know that this game has over 4 hours of music in it, that’s an amazing feat.

There is even a whole suite where you can create your own pages, music and mods released by one of the main developers of this game. It works only on Windows and you can read more about it on the itch.io page of Jay Tolen here. There were even various community events where your stuff could appear as an Easter egg in the main game. Yet, these tools are now part of the main game and are in your installation folder.

Speaking about this, modding this game is extremely easy. There is even a build in mod browser, and it’s a piece of cake to install and downloads mods. If you use the in-game mod menu, you don’t have to reboot the game for most mods to take effect. Just go to the main menu, choose the mods button and install the mods you want. Now, there are a lot more mods out there then just what you can find in the in-game mod browser, so check them out here.

The game has an autosave, it doesn’t really show when the game gets saved. There are three save slots, so if you want to replay the game, you can pick another save slot. Now, if there is one mod I highly advise is he expanded endgame cases mod. This mod expands the game quite naturally and is a lot of fun and additional challenge. But don’t read the description when you haven’t finished the game, since it contains quite a lot of spoilers.

This game can be quite tricky. Sometimes the solution isn’t the easiest to find. It’s even possible you don’t find the solution to every puzzle out there. Now, there is a built in hint system for this game. It’s somewhat hidden to avoid immersion breaking, but for a small HypnoCoin fee, you can get a hint to progress. I really love this system, since I rather have you getting a crowbar to get yourself unstuck than you getting a guide where it’s very easy to other things and spoil the whole experience. Since the fun of this genre depends highly on solving the puzzles with what’s given to you. If you want to get a hint, just search hint.

Overall I have been extremely positive about this game, and I have to say that overall this game is extremely well-made. I rarely found any moments where I thought, this isn’t right. But does that mean that this game doesn’t have any negatives? Well, sadly enough there are a few things I didn’t like about my experience and that I want to talk about.

First of all, I wish the default text-to-speech voice wasn’t the default language of your system if you aren’t English. I’m from Belgium and my text-to-speech voice reads English extremely weird. Thankfully, I had the English soundpack installed on my computer so after I went into the BIOS settings, I was able to quickly change it to the English one and it sounds a lot more natural and better.

Secondly, this is an issue in general with point-and-click games but the replay value just isn’t here. Once you explored everything, you have seen everything. There are various mini-games, but those are quickly beaten. While I personally don’t really see this is a negative, since not every game needs high replay value and sometimes playing it once and having the whole experience engulf you is the idea… I want to mention it, if somebody is looking for replayable games.

Third, you can find more infractions than what’s required to close the case. While I can understand that the game doesn’t tell you how many other things there are out there for immersion reasons, as somebody who wanted to experience everything, I was sometimes a bit annoyed that I couldn’t make sure I found everything. If only there was an option you could toggle to see completion percentage or something of that nature. Since, because of this, it’s possible to lock yourself out of achievements or content in this game.

Yes, this game has achievements and some of them are extremely tricky to get. It took me a lot of researching and exploring in HypnoSpace to find all the material. Thankfully, taking notes really helped me to find it all.

And the final thing is that the final chapters of this game feel a bit rushed and undercooked. One of the final cases is a breeze to solve if you have written notes during your playthrough and it feels like there is content cut out of the game. The ending comes a bit out of nowhere and if you didn’t explore everything or didn’t register certain things, the ending won’t make sense to you and it will loose it’s impact. Thankfully, the mod I shared earlier resolves this to a degree.

That’s all the negative I could say about this game, in my honest opinion. When this game clicks with you, it clicks really well and doesn’t let go at all. But, I’ll leave my final thoughts after the summary of this review. So, I think it’s high time for that since I have touch upon everything I wanted to in this review.

Summary

The bad:

-Text-to-speech should use English by default

-It’s possible to miss content or lock yourself out of it.

-The game is rather short.

-Rushed ending.

The good:

+ Amazing nostalgic trip

+ Amazing music

+ Fantastic writing

+ Easy to use mod tools

+ Great puzzles

+ Great controls

+ …

Final thoughts:

Hypnospace Outlaw is an amazing nostalgic point-and-click adventure trip through the late ’90’s internet. This game might not be for everyone, but when it clicks… Oh boy does it really click. Now, this is also a game you shouldn’t rush. The charm of this game is in all the little details and references that are hidden in the pages and the world building of this game.

While the game is rather at the shortside for point-and-click games, I don’t see it as a big problem to be honest. The journey that this game took me on was a lot more worth it to me than having a long game. Since, I think it would have lost it’s charm if this game kept going and going.

While I personally have more memories with the internet time period that came right after it, the developers are already working on the sequel to this game called Dreamsettler. I honestly can’t wait to play that one, since the quality that this game has is just top notch. The music is catchy, the visuals are amazing and it alls comes together in an amazing nostalgic trip that makes you want to play more.

There are some minor blemishes on this game, but you can work with them. Like I said before, when this game clicks, it really does click extremely well. I’d compare my experience with games like There Is No Game or SuperLiminal. Amazing small titles that leave a lasting impact on those who play it. All of these games are passion projects that turned out amazing and get a recommendation from me.

If you enjoy playing unique point-and-click games and/or if you have nostalgia for the old ’90’s internet, I highly recommend that you give this game a try. While this game is on multiple platforms, I highly recommend that you play the PC version since it has mod support that gives you even more toys to play with and expands the game even more.

I had a blast with this game and it’s a breath of fresh air for me. I’m angry at myself that I rushed my playthrough, but now I have installed several mods and I’m so going to replay this game after I have published this article. I also want to earn every achievement in this game, since I really want to see everything. I’m also extremely hyped for the sequel to this game and I can’t wait to start playing that, since that is going to be an even bigger nostalgic trip for me than this game. And with the amazing set of developers behind this game, I think we get another gem in our hands.

And with that said, I think it’s high time to wrap this article up. I want to thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Score: 100/100

First Impression: Drawngeon: Dungeons of Ink and Paper (Switch) ~ Classroom Doodles Came To Life

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Nintendo.com microsite – Drageus page – Official Steam Page

As somebody who works in a school as an IT guy, I’m interested when a game does something that is somewhat school-related. Today I’m going to talk about a game that does something of that nature. Well, the connection might be a bit far fetched but hey, it’s there if you look far enough. So, today’s game is Drawngeon. The publisher Drageus Games gave me a press code for the Nintendo Switch version. In this game, a drawn dungeon comes to life. Now, this game is rather cheap so it might turn people off. But, should you be turned off by this game or is it totally worth your time? Let’s find out in this 100% my honest opinion game quicky review of this game. And as usual, feel free to leave a comment with your opinion on the game and/or the content of this article in the comment section down below. 

Editorial note: During the play sessions and writing of this review, an update came out. It’s possible that some complaints might be fixed in a future version. This review is written on v1.0.3.

Classroom Doodles Came To Life

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In this game, you play as a nameable character that is going to explore the drawn dungeons of this world. I think that the store page explains the story better then I can explain it.

The life went on as usual in the Inkland, until the Tower has suddenly fallen straight from the sky!
Many heroes tried to solve its mystery, but none of them succeeded! Maybe it’s your turn to test yourself?

Explore the procedurally generated game world of the Inkland – dungeons, caves, forest and, of course, the Mysterious Tower. Who can reveal all the secrets of the Mysterious Tower?

For those who don’t know what “procedurally generated” means, let me quickly explain it. It means that every time you enter the game, the layout will be different. If you have ever heard about Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, it’s the same basic idea. I find this quite surprising in a good way. For a cheap game like this, the fact that you can replay this game multiple… well, it gives you even more bang for your 4-5 bucks (Depends if the game is on sale or not 😉 ).

This gives the game more variety as well.  Every playthrough will be different. There is a game that’s quite similar to this one in concept and that’s Delver and Eldritch.  These games throw you into a dungeon as well, where the layout and enemy placement is very different every time. And I enjoyed those two games quite a lot. What I’m saying is that I enjoyed my time quite a lot with this game.

The game looks amazing. It looks like somebody drew his whole ideal Dungeons and Dragons lay-out in a sketchbook during study hall or something of that nature. The little use of color makes the items you can interact with stand out that much more.

The further you get into the game, the more bonus material you unlock. These are mostly concept art but they are a nice view of the development of this game. Now, there is a collectable that makes a cat person like me extremely happy. There are a ton of hidden cats all over the map and they are a joy to collect!

The bad ones.

EReFQHkUYAE6jh1Now, the game looks quite nice. I mentioned that before. Yet, there are a few things that ruin the immersion a bit. For example, the game has a problem with slopes. You can look right through them from some angles. You can see an example in the screenshot here. The void or the textures from the block behind are clearly visible.

But that isn’t the only problem I have with the visual presentation of this game. The big issue I have comes with animation of especially the battles. During a battle, which isn’t turned based but rather in realtime, you get an indication that you got hit. But, there is no indication that you hit the enemy. Yes, the text underneath the playing field tells you that you did or didn’t do damage to the enemy but why isn’t this visually shown like hits on your character?

Now, I can totally understand that a game of this nature needs to have a certain difficulty curve. But this game’s difficulty curve is a bit too much. I have no problem with enemies taking 3 to 4 hits to kill when you start the game, but the damage you get versus the damage you can do is a bit too much. Similar games like Delver are more balanced and make the game a bit more enjoyable to play.

The controls are easy to get used to but I’m sorry, they have a few issues that I really didn’t like at all. The first big issue is turning. You can turn by using the left and right shoulder buttons. Personally, I would have used these as strafe buttons. So, basically switch the left and right arrows around with the shoulder buttons.

The second issue I have with the controls is inventory management. The fact that there is no tutorial section, makes it extremely difficult to easily figure out the mechanics of the inventory. It took me some time before I was able to throw items on the ground, move and equip them. This brings me to another issue with the UI. But more on that later.

The 3rd issue is the fact that there isn’t a run button. This makes exploring the map a bit boring. Especially when you are restarting for the 10th time. You have seen most of the early area and you want to get through it as quickly as possible.

When you equip a stat-boosting item, it appears that your stats stay unchanged. Your stats are displayed next to your character portrait and those stay the same no matter what you equip. In addition to that, I don’t even know or understand which stats are what. Now, the description of the items changes color when it’s an improvement but it’s in orange. Why not green or red like in any other RPG?

Not to mention, the inventory is a bit tricky to use. It’s extremely small, so you have to really think about what you take with you and what you leave behind. But, when you want to pick up an item and you don’t have enough room in your inventory, you get the same basic text: “Not enough room in your inventory.” So, you don’t know about what item you can’t pick up and how much space you need in your inventory.

The sound design is a hit and miss story. While the sound effects add to the immersion of this game, sadly there aren’t enough sound effects in the game. For example, the sound effects for most of the enemy’s movements are exactly the same for bats, spiders, and other monsters. This is a big shame since a lot of players use these sound effects to know which enemies are coming to properly prepare themselves. Now, the music or the lack thereof really adds to the atmosphere of the game. The music that’s present is really well done and gives off the tense atmosphere that the game has.

Something that I found, on one hand, interesting and on the other hand extremely annoying, is the fact that to level up or boost your stats, you have to go to a tree at the starting village. It’s an interesting way to level up your character but it’s annoying that you can’t do this in a menu like almost every other similar game.

And with all that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game, so I think it’s high time to wrap up this article with the conclusion and my thoughts on this game.

Conclusion

If you read this article, it might seem that this game has a ton of flaws. And I have to admit, this game has extremely rough edges that can frustrate a lot of players. But on the other hand, this game does have a lot of positives that make the game extremely enjoyable to play.

The big problem is that I have seen and played better games in this style. And even on the Nintendo Switch: One More Dungeon is an example. So, is this game a bad game? Well, yes and no. It has its problems and shortcomings but it also has a lot of strong points.

This game is like a broken phone screen. It still works and it’s still a decent way to use your phone but the more the cracks start growing and showing, the more you have to get used to the shortcomings or replace it with a better and more polished screen.

Honestly, I think that this game needed way more time to develop. Since the potential for an extremely enjoyable game is present in this game. But not in the version I have reviewed.

So, would I recommend this game? Yes, but with a disclaimer. Know that this game isn’t the best game you will ever play but it has a certain charm. To who would I recommend this game? To people who enjoy dungeon crawlers or games like Delver and One More Dungeon.

And with that, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game. I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Score: 60/100

First Impression: Tarzan (GBC) ~ Hide and SEEK.

TARZAN_gbc_E_IGN entry

So, one day on a garage sale, I saw this game. Since one of the very first games I ever played was Tarzan on the PC, I had to have this. I enjoyed this game quite a lot. And now, after all those years, I still have the same cartridge and the instruction booklet. I’m quite happy that I still have it since I have fond memories of it. Now, I have never finished this game since I couldn’t get passed the tiger battle as a kid. That’s why I’m writing a first impression. Anyways, enough stalling, let’s dive right into this game and let’s take a look at it. As usual, feel free to leave a comment on the game and or the content of this article. 

Collect-a-banana gameplay.

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The story in this game is amazing. They made it work on the Gameboy Color! They follow the movie quite perfect. The levels and stages are designed around some amazing scenes of the movie. As a kid, I watched that movie a lot.

While the characters don’t have a lot of development in the game, I still enjoyed this story quite a lot. I’m so glad that they know what the gameboy color was capable of doing.

The game is surprisingly longer then you would think. This game consists out of 23 stages. Which is quite long for a movie game. It’s actually quite good too. This game is a platformer, but not in your traditional sense. You need to collect a certain amount of banana’s before you can advance to the next stage. The amount of banana’s you need to collect are shown when you start the level.

You don’t always play as Tarzan, there are levels as Tuck… but…

The bad things.

Tarzan_GBC_ScreenShot2

… There is barely any variation between the characters. They all play the same. Apart from Tuck’s hitbox being slightly bigger then Tarzan’s.

While the controls are really solid, the jump animation is a bit broken. Sometimes the jumps, well, don’t work. You can’t grab a ledge you see clearly in front of you or you clip right through the edge.

I don’t know it was my copy or not, but the sound was messed up. The music had like a missing line of melody. The noise it added was rather annoying.

A disappointment was that you couldn’t multiplayer the hide and seek mode. You had to pass your gameboy to your friend after you had hidden one of the characters. That was a major let down for me. Thankfully, this allowed me to play this game with my sister. Since we only had one copy of the game back then.

Another annoyance is that the checkpoints aren’t clearly indicated. Suddenly, you get shown that you reached a checkpoint, but it looked like a usual ledge or platform to me at first. Also, if i remember correctly, once taken is always taken.

Oh, don’t get me started on the password system. It’s quite creative by using symbols but why do they have a password system in place for this game? There were games like the Legend of Zelda who showed that they can make a saving system work on the Gameboy color!

 Is it bad?

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So, I have talked about most of the things this game does wrong. But it isn’t that bad. Thankfully, this game has some other good things. The animation blew my mind, and it still does today. What Disney displays here, is just amazing. The game feels tense and nice.

Looking at it now, you could argue that this game has the problem of design over gameplay. I mentioned earlier that some jumps didn’t work correctly. I think the culprit is that the animation is too good.

The difficulty curve is just perfect. While some parts might be a bit unforgiving, I don’t think that is such a bad thing. Do you seriously expect games from that age to be forgiving.

Visually, this game is nice to look at. The game is sometimes a maze… Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that a map would be nice. But at the other hand, I understand why there isn’t a map. Since you play inside the jungle, which is unmapped terrain in the first place. Also, Tarzan doesn’t know the whole jungle like the back of his hand.

Another thing I forgot to mention is how you go to the next level. As soon as you got all the required banana’s you don’t go to the next level automatically, you have to find your partner. He is hidden in sometimes a hard to reach area. This tests your knowledge of the level and you have to use all your skills.

What I don’t understand, and I can’t test it since I don’t have one, is that this game supports the Gameboy Printer. Yes, you can make images and print them. This is wasted potential in my eyes.

Before I wrap up this article, I think I should talk a bit more about the controls. Since there isn’t any tutorial, I liked it that you can find out what each button does on your own. But, as soon as you play, you will understand that this isn’t the best choice. You’ll have to play that in order to understand it. Otherwise I ruined each surprise.

Anyways, let’s wrap up this first impression here. I almost wanted to start the conclusion as I was writing a review. But I haven’t beaten this game, so I can’t write a review. Anyways, I think this game deserves a play. It isn’t perfect, but it’s good. It isn’t polished, but it’s fun.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this article. I wish you happy holidays and I look forward to seeing you guys soon. Since the Gameboy and Gameboy Color month will still go in January. I had a way more busy time then I expected, so I couldn’t write enough articles as I wanted for this theme. That’s why I decided that. But anyways~ Take care!

Review: Playmobil Top Secret Agents (DS) ~ Climb ladders with stone.

Playmobil Game

This game didn’t have a site, so here is the GameSpot page.

My buddies over at Arpegi wanted me to review something different. Games I never really finished like SuperMan 64 came up. So, it’s obvious that they wanted me to review a bad game. I selected this “gem” instead. It’s a game I, tried, to play and never really 100% finished. Like I said in my Corpse Party impression article, I usually write about games when I’m completely finished them. But this game is different. On my old Dutch blog, I had simply a list of why this game was so terrible. But I am now going to give it a fair review. Let’s see if I wasn’t harsh on this game, I actually went ahead and replayed the game for as long as I could and then started writing this article. I’m rather curious how it’s going to turn out since my list of things I want to talk about has grown each part of the game. That can be a good and a bad thing since I didn’t tell if it were praises or complaints. One thing is for sure, it isn’t a good game, it’s not going to get many points. But like the Happy Video Game Nerd has a video series, how bad is it really? And is it worth playing it? Even if it’s only to see how bad it truly is.

So, what’s the game?

playmobil-top-agents-nintendo-ds-001_mAlright, let’s dive right into this game. The first thing I have two men and… I already forgot what the game is about. The story is so generic that it isn’t even funny anymore.

The music sounds like a track of not even a minute looped over and over. The music sounds like something you created in a program where you can drap & drop samples into a timeline. Normally, I listen to the music while writing the article but this time, it couldn’t get me even in the mood to write or remember how to game played. It’s generic and forgettable.

So, I haven’t left the menu screen just yet. The font of the menu screen is terrible. When I’m on the menu where I can pick new game files, the word “game” looks almost like the replaced the letter G with an eight. Some letters are pretty close to each other and some letters like the “W” seem to take up more space than they should.

Plus, it wouldn’t surprise me that they didn’t play many games before this. Which game actually says, “Delete game file”? So, in other words, you can delete the game files from the menu screen? Well, that’s a very new and risky feature. I’ll be sure to try that out.

So, I skip something’s at the menu’s and dive right into the gameplay. One thing I can credit this game for, the game looks clean and inviting to play. They did a good job there. The music gets a little better but doesn’t sound catchy at all.

Plus, the names in the game are way too generic. Like the story. A random bad guy suddenly takes over the city or world, and after you have some minor plot holes, you are left with a confused mind after the introduction. I can understand that

this game might be based on a cartoon series or a comic book show, but they then leave the guys who don’t follow it in the dark and confused.

Climb ladders with stone.

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After the opening you get an extremely long introduction to the story. And like you would expect, the story is extremely generic. It’s a kids game, I can forgive it, but it’s extremely forgettable. Wait, I actually take something back. A kids game can have a pretty memorable story. If you take of the Nintendo games and look at the games that are targeted towards kids, you can clearly see that the story is rather interesting.

I went through the effort to make this screenshot myself. This clearly shows the Q&A (word for quality testing) that this game lacks. The animation goes down in my eyes since you don’t climb up the ladder correctly. And here is the thing, it’s the very first ladder you meet in the game.

I forgot to actually mention that you need to press select after each dialogue/cut scene. And I had and actually have still trouble adjusting to that.

I touched on this before, but the names don’t improve this game. “Jet Girl” and “Agent SPY” are two prime examples of this.

I have to give this game also some positive feedback, the game’s controls actually do work. And the game does what’s supposed to do. But let’s go further into the game and let’s see if it gets any better, or worse.

The driving. 

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On my previous blog I didn’t give this game a full review like I’m doing now. And I want to correct that with this review. I often play games that aren’t targeted to my age or my style but when I got to the part where I needed to hit the road, I gave up.

I’m truly patient with games and I like to give them a fair chance, but this game truly lost me at the driving part. The drivers ride all over the place, and they can’t turn at the road at all. It almost seems like the game’s animation is based on a grid and made, and then the levels are designed. Sadly enough, this makes things break when a level is changed.

Also, I don’t get why on so many places you need to be reminded of the current date & time. That’s a truly “helpful” feature. It’s almost like they put this feature in so that the kids have no excuse anymore when it’s time to stop playing and go to bed.

I also don’t like how the game asks your language every time you start. This is similar to how you don’t have buttons to not have to press the select button after the 2nd or 3rd time you have to. Genius!

But back to the driving. It simply doesn’t work solid enough. Textures can glitch in each other, cars can ride in each other. Your radar/ map isn’t clear, and the controls truly are messed up and unresponsive at times. Also, the game got a lot uglier at these parts, and it looks pixelated as if this game was for MS-DOS. What I’m trying to get to is that this game doesn’t look sharp in these sections.

And at this part I started to lose interest. I remember from the first time I played this game that this is actually a couple of mini-games. And judging that you can select these from the main menu, the game must be a “blast to play”. Since this gives me the impression that the game is rather short. Well, time for the conclusion.

Conclusion

The good:

+ The game controls work in the non-driving sections.

+ The non-driving sections look inviting.

The bad:

– Nearly no sound effects.

– Lacking story.

– Terrible driving.

– Annoying menu’s.

– Bad animation.

– Music that isn’t fun.

– Extremely easy game.

– Glitchy AI, like in the driving parts.

– Uncreative names.

My final thoughts:

I played a lot of Playmobil when I was young, and I got excited when I saw this game. And oh boy, do I regret this buying impulse that I sold this game. I normally don’t get rid of games, but this game was way too terrible to play.

This game lost my interest extremely fast. I have read some other reviewers talk about this game being fun for kids, but if you are a kid or a parent, I don’t advise this game at all. There are way better games to play that are way more fun and will be less frustrating than this one. The Nintendo DS library is big, but this is one of the games that is a mold on the game library.

Don’t buy this game, it’s awful and doesn’t deserve any positive attention. I might be very harsh here, but this game is one of the worst games I have actually played without seeing it in a TOP 10 list.

Score: 20/100