Reviews

Review by darkbits all reviews by darkbits

This game crashed at startup for me, on both computers I tried it on. I'm sad to say I'm forced to give it a below average review :(

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 2 Technical 1 Genre 2

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

I had some trouble playing the entry (see below), but with some help from the author I managed in the end.

Although this game is incomplete, I was impressed with the smoothly animated dragon graphics, and the cute running populace. So it's worth some points in the artistical category. This has the beginnings of a nice game, but unfortunately incomplete.

About the trouble I had running this entry: The provided binary crashed for me on windows. So I tried to compile this myself on linux. There was no makefile, so I created one (now in git). Then there were problems with mismatching case in one of the header files - linux file systems are case sensitive you know. Finally the game crashed on startup because of missing resources. Moving them to the project root folder solved that problem. Definitely not easy to get this game running.

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 3 Technical 1 Genre 2

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

----- Description -----

In this game, you control a dragon. The dragon can walk, jump and fly around a small cyclic world. There are some huts on the ground. Sometimes humans pop out of the huts. The dragon can then attack the humans by moving onto them. The humans are destroyed and contribute to the dragon's score. The score can in turn be used to upgrade the dragon. The current score is factorized into primes, and bigger primes mean better upgrades.

The game is only partly finished. Perhaps in a finished version, the dragon should be able to breathe fire, the opponents should be more versatile and have some way to counter the attacks. Right now, the game does not provide any challenge at all, so it is more like a sight-seeing tour than a battle. However, the game has some potential and can be made actually playable rather quickly if the developers decide to put some more time into it.

----- TINS 2012 Rules Coverage -----

[Genre: creative anachronism.]
The anachronism declared is aztecs and aliens versus the dragon. However, aliens did not get implemented in time, so there's not much about anachronism in it.

[Artistic: here be dragons.]
The player character is a dragon.

[Technical: record progress.]
The player can continue a previous game, restoring all purchased upgrades.

[Technical: parallax scrolling.]
The clouds and far mountains move "further" than the world, providing a nice visual effect.

[Technical: prime numbers.]
The upgrade system is highly dependent on prime factorization of the current score.

----- Evaluation -----

[Overall:]
The game is technically playable but does not provide a challenge. It is capable to hold the player for perhaps 10 minutes until he or she sees all the content and realizes there is no resistance to player's actions.

[Artistical:]
The dragon animation is OK. The world details are fine, too. The humans, on the other hand, have too little pixels in them. There sounds and music are fine.

[Technical:]
The things which were actually implemented work fine. It is a bit funny how the dragon follows the mouse in flight and can actually fly in the direction of its tail; on second thought, why not?

The game includes about 130,000 bytes of readable C++/Allegro5 code.

[Genre:]
The anachronism genre rule is hardly implemented. The genre part of the game is not finished (in all senses of the word).

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 2