Reviews

Review by stevenvi all reviews by stevenvi

This game is also cute. I have just finished reviewing Jeff Bernard\'s Sexy Panda game, and must say that Beetzkrieg is even cuter. The artwork is adorable in this game, and I can tell that the author put some good effort in that.

In the game, you control a bee and must collect pollen from the flowers and bring it back to your hive. You can play against up to three of your friends. You fly down to the flowers at the ground, collect the pollen, return to your hive, drop off the pollen, and repeat. The player who collects the set quantity of pollen first wins!

While the concept is novel, it isn\'t particularly fun, which is unfortunate. I really like the look of the game, so I was hoping that it would stand out as one of the top entries. I tried to play with my fiancee, but we got bored of it very quickly and did not play again.

As I have said already, this game looks great. The art is wonderfully drawn and is pleasant to look at. There is no insulting that I am aware of in the game, however that does not mean this is not a part of the game. In my experience, most multiplayer games where you compete against others will always involve insulting dialog between the players. So were someone to play the game in the proper situation, they certainly would experience insulting dialog.

As for world domination, that\'s kind of in here, too. It is your goal to compete against the other bees and dominate your world: the flowers. So that\'s in there as well, and is key to the purpose of the game.

Technically, the game works. Colliding with the hives feels natural. But that\'s about it. There isn\'t much to the game. I do not see anything which would imply the use of atan2 in the game. Based on the readme file, I do not expect to find this anywhere in the source code.

This is one of the few games which has a menu. A menu is an excellent thing for any game, and I find it improves the playability of the game greatly. It gives it a more polished feeling than some of the other TINS entries.

The biggest technical problem I saw was the split-screen part. The screen splits just fine, but the viewports are not scaled. So you can see much more of the screen playing solo than you can with four. This should be altered in future versions; you cannot see much with four players.

Genre-wise, there is only a very minimal amount of destruction. You can destroy hive tiles by running into them then holding away, making you thrust your stinger at it. (Shh, that wouldn\'t really work for a real bee.) Other than that though, I didn\'t see destruction going on, but instead competition with the other bees.

Overall, the game was a disappointment. It is a unique concept, but it isn\'t quite working yet. Hopefully with time the author can improve on the game idea and produce a fun multiplayer game. Network support would be a good place to start.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 2 Genre 2

Review by stevenvi all reviews by stevenvi

The Life and Times of the Sexy Panda:
Journey to the Center of the Death Core

This is a cute little game, though the concept is a bit simple. It begins with the \"cuddlegators\" explaining how the game works. You walk around a room and collect the alligators, while viruses move around and destroy floor tiles. If one hits you, you must start the level over. Some of the alligators will babel about \"The Doctor\" and other things. They also will occasionally insult you. I personally ignored these messages, because they didn\'t really affect the game one way or another.

After a few levels, you will encounter a new type of character, the repair droids. These replace the tiles that the viruses remove. Waiting around for them can be a nightmare, and really isn\'t particularly fun. It is very common that you will get trapped by the viruses either by isolating you from the rest of the level, or isolating an alligator, rendering the level unbeatable. Pressing Tab will restart the level if this happens.

Eventually you will come to a level which requires ten alligators be rescued. I could not beat this level no matter how many times I tried. Then I accidentally hit Esc and it closed the game without confirmation. Doh.

Artistically, I thought this game was cute. The panda\'s eyes were a little strange, but I suppose that can be overlooked. The art isn\'t just scribbles made with mspaint, so that\'s always a plus. There was definitely some insulting going on, though I didn\'t really get any feeling of world domination. There was something about \"The Doctor\", but since no readme file was provided I didn\'t understand the story.

Technically, the game works. The check for interaction with an alligator is a little strange in some places, so perhaps that could be fixed. Was atan2 used? This is rather hard to tell from just playing a game. After glancing, my suspicion was correct: the enemies use atan2 for an angle, to make them point towards a \"target\". Unfortunately, the target is completely random, thus the use of atan2 is also just a mostly random angle. Kind of against the spirit of the rule in my opinion.

I wish that there were jumping in the game. That would have made it much easier to avoid the empty tiles. This is the game\'s major technical flaw. As was stated above, you can get trapped and must start the levels over. That really isn\'t fun to me.

Genre. Well, tiles are destroyed. They talk about \"The Doctor\" wanting to destroy the world or something... I think. So the theme is at least present. However, it is not particularly at the forefront of the game. The game is more of a race against time to get the alligators, and destruction is the reasoning used to collect them. Since it isn\'t really explained, at least not as far as I was able to get, I didn\'t see much of any of the TINS themes expressed.

Overall, the game is cute. It is not interesting to play more than once, however, because you must play through every level to get back to where you left off last time. This was common in games many years ago, but the feeling of this game is different. It isn\'t like advancing through the stages in Pacman, where you try for the highest score each time. It\'s collecting the same alligators for the sole purpose of advancing to the next level.

With some touch-ups, this game could turn into a fun little pastime, however in it\'s TINS state it still needs a bit of work.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 2

Review by stevenvi all reviews by stevenvi

Hmm, what is this? The readme file did not explain how to play. As far as I can tell this is not a game.

From what I can gather about the game, this is how it works: you press Spacebar to drop bombs. You want to blow up all the things. Once you blow up all the things you have nothing else to do.

This game needs more work. :)

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 2 Technical 1 Genre 2

Review by stevenvi all reviews by stevenvi

This game did not run on my computer, and no instructions were provided to assist in the matter.

The game sets a video mode, then a Windows error message appears. Both the binary pack file as well as when I compile the source myself do this.

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None