Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Qbitter is inspired by, and plays similar to Q-bert.

The game is nice, but too easy. It's far too easy to avoid enemies, and an arcade game like this needs to be challenging to stay interesting. Also, unlike Q-bert, it's impossible to jump off the field. I've played the post-compo version too, to see what it might have been, and that is definitely improved! But in this review I won't consider it.

This game is inspired by Escher, but also by Q-bert. In the README, you point out that Q-bert itself is also inspired by Escher. This is a neat little factoid, it's nice how it all comes together, so to speak. But Q-bert does it a little better: it has upside-down enemies that move as though gravity works different for them, just like in the Escher etch. I think you would have really killed it if enemies in Qbitter used the same inverted gravity idea, but perhaps it's hard to do that and keep it original.

What I would like to see is more variation in the levels! Sometimes, a block is inverted, which creates an interesting visual effect, but also makes you have to think more about how you navigate the screen. But these inverted blocks occur pretty rarely. As far as I'm concerned, you could easily add more. Or you could play with the shape of the field - does it always need to be a rectangle? Maybe the shape of the field can be a hexagon too!

Overall: 3. A very playable game, but the fun factor and replay value are diminished because it's little too easy
Art: 4. The relation to Escher is definitely there. Escher would have approved of the isometric style and the regular tiling. I like the choice of font, it makes the game look very stylish. You plug your own library in the credits.
Tech: 4. Hexagons are there in two ways: hexagons form the enemy, plus the isometric view of a cube also looks like a hexagon!
Genre: 3. You invoked the bonus rule here, so I'm ignoring the relative lack of humor and looked at the unit test code. I count about half a dozen tests spread over two modules. Not bad, for a game jam! But it's not exceptional either.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by dos all reviews by dos

A solid entry which pretty much just needs some difficulty and stage progression adjustments in order to be a perfectly playable and enjoyable game. As submitted it's kinda pointless though :) Did not try the updated version yet to not skew my judgement, but I definitely will.

Sadly, no music or sounds of any kind. Graphics are perfectly adequate though. Artistic and technical requirements are fulfilled in pretty obvious ways. Very interesting technically - go look into its source code - although it lacks clear instructions on how to build the TINS version from the archive without reaching for updated code from git. Unit testing elevates the genre score ;)

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by Tijzz all reviews by Tijzz

The game idea is cool and makes interesting use of an actual work by Escher.

The gameplay is basic, just collect the stars and then you go to the next level. Simple, but it works.
The controls were very weird at the start and could maybe have been explained in a quick tutorial. However, after a short while, I got them under control and then breezed through the levels.
The difficulty went up when you finished a level, however, this only happened very slightly and was hardly noticable. I think this difficulty ramp up should have been much larger. I reached level 20 and it was as easy as level 1.
The enemies were very easy to avoid and there were extra lives everywhere. So getting hit by an enemy didn't really matter.

What is missing is music, just some background music would have done a whole lot.

As said before, the usage of the Eschers rule is very nice. The usage of the hexagonal rule is there, but very basic, this could have been better. I missed the plug for another game.

Regardless of the improvements stated above, I think you made a cool little game!

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None