Reviews

Review by darkbits all reviews by darkbits

This game crashed at startup for me, on both computers I tried it on. A bummer, since it looks really nice from screenshots. I'm sad to say I'm forced to give it a below average review :(

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 3 Technical 1 Genre 2

Review by Mankarse all reviews by Mankarse

When we saw the design document for Wael the Wheel Whale, we were instantly convinced this game would be the winner. Nobody could possibly stand up to a concept like this. This story would surely provide much needed insight into the secretly vengeful nature of whales.

Artistic
Wael's graphic and animations were very well implemented. The walk (or wheel) cycle matched up to the ground perfectly, and was very amusing to watch as well. The overall look of the game was simple but worked well together.
There was meant to be music, but unfortunately the .OGGs were corrupted and didn't load (not sure why).
There were some dragons here, so that covered the requirement.

Technical
There was parallax scrolling.
There may have been saving, but it wasn't persistent -- upon death you would go backwards to a point you had progressed to, rather than repeat the level from the start. There was no real way to control where or how far you would go back to though, and no way to load progress.
We could not see any implementation of the prime number rule.
There were several small bugs in the implementation, the most annoying of which being a flawed collision algorithm that would result in an out of bounds exception causing the game to terminate when a particular enemy was killed.

Genre
It looked like the anachronism requirement was halfway implemented, judging from the tanks littered around the level. Perhaps Wael's incredibly futuristic technological augment (the wheel) was meant to provide the genre requirement when combined with the tanks and dragons?

Overall
It's hard to fault a game that contains a wheel whale, but still there are issues with game length, and the generic nature of the gameplay. There was no real way to progress, other than killing everything in your path.
The game was not particularly fun, but it was still playable.

P.S. Please complete this game, we would like to see the president.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 2 Genre 2

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Wael is a whale with a wheel attached to it. Using this wheel it rides about and shoots some dragons.

You appear to have unlimited lives, which is a good thing, because you die very easily. At a certain point you encounter a wall of dragons, and the only way to get past is to jump in shooting wildly, die a couple of times, and hope for the best.

It also appears that if you die, you respawn immediately a few blocks back. This is OK, but you often respawn at a spot above one of those red blocks so you die immediately again. Sometimes you die several times in a row this way.

Rule implementation: The anachronism is there, the dragons and the parallax scrolling are there too. It's not very clear if and how the prime numbers rule or the save progress rules are implemeted.

It's a good effort, but the gameplay is too limited to be a real contender. What I like the most about this game are the cute low-res graphics and the color palette. Wael is animated, which adds a nice effect.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 4 Technical 2 Genre 3

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

[These are short notes, not a full review]
Original but not complete.

[+]
The wheel whale is crazy enough to be fun. Anachronism, dragons and parallax scrolling are present.

[-]
Does not seem to have a clear goal. The controls and detection of moving onto lava are not very friendly.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 3