Reviews

Review by elias all reviews by elias

Awsome entry. Really well made for 72 hours. There's a scrolling title screen with music, a game over text, and little details like the animation when the snake is out of paint.

All the rules are also implemented, snake&fox fable, the foxes and the snake can talk in speech bubbles, lots of iridescence and the color chart you can view in the center is essential to the game.

I couldn't figure out a way to stop the foxes (at some point a few of them turned brown instead of grey but I'm not sure why). So while I was laboring a lot to spray paint everywhere eventually they always made it all gray...

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by victorwss all reviews by victorwss

The game idea is very interesting and the usage of colors is very smart.

However the colors aren't really iridiscent. They are just a mosaic of fixed colors. But this might be close enough.

There are some speech balloons, y los animales hablan español. But they don't show anything really important.

The characters are all animals: a snake and a lot of gray evil foxes that turn normal orange-brown when cured.

However, there isn't a fable there yet, although there is some message about colors being lively, good and happy in contrast of colorless gray being dead, evil and sad.

There is no 2-player stuff.

The chart is interesting and helpful, but it isn't very accessible.

However, the game is very unfair and unbalanced. The objective is to defend the castle, but this task is hopeless and doomed to fail quickly.

The game is infinite as it is. However, it can't be even played for long time. There are simply too many enemies swarming the castle and you are only one, too weak and too slow to defend it, and the castle is too big for that. And this is sad. With only small changes, this could be fixed.

The code is somewhat confusing and have some structural problems, but it is workable and far from being a huge mess. However, making it compile and run was difficulty, and was one of the hardest to get a working binary file, mainly due to missing DLLs.

My suggestion for improvements would be:

* Make the cured foxes regenerate the castle color or fight the evil foxes or help the snake somehow. As they are, cured foxes don't do anything useful.

* Make the castle smaller or add things like teleporters or maybe less entrance points in order to make it more defensible. Castles were built with the intent of being formidable strongholds very difficulty to be invaded and easy to defend, but this isn't the case here.

* This game would become much more interesting if it features levels. You could either make the game finite or keep it infinite. At least, the first levels should be easily beatable. Later levels, difficulty, but surely beatable and only if it is still infinite, some very distant levels unbeatable.

* Or perhaps, if there is only a single infinite level as it is, add some highscores presenting how long players endured.

* Make more usage of the chart. It could show also not only the total color of the castle, but also the coloring/grayness per castle part (floors and right/center/left).

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 3

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

In Rainbow Castle you're a snake that pukes color onto colorless foxes and the colorless stone of a castle. The foxes normally try to decolor the castle but when sufficiently colored by way of your actions, they... cease and dessist and you get points. Otherwise, if they decolor the castle enough you lose. There's no victory condition, every run results in a loss and a possible new high score. I found it rather annoying how I kept running out of... color... it was very unsatisfying to actually to fulfill the goal of the game.

The graphics of the game were not too bad, I especially liked the pie chart for the amount of color left in the castle. The removal and addition of color of the castle was also a neat effect.

The animal genre was sort of minimal, there's a snake and the foxes. There were a lot of rainbow colors... the color display in particular was a very nice touch, but rainbows are not iridiscence. The foxes, inexplicably, will talk to you via speech bubbles, as requested. I liked the pie chart, a very nice 3d effect.

In total, the game looked nice but it wasn't very fun to play.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by underthesink all reviews by underthesink

Marvellous for something made in 72 hours. not easy to do
It meets all requirements as far as I can see, art style is functional all characters have animations and the controls work

well done entry

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by Yubi all reviews by Yubi

Rainbow Castle is a game that took this competition's iridescence rule to heart and treated it not as a mere obstacle to get around, but its centerpiece. In the iridescence category, it is far and away the best in show. The painting and re-painting the walls and floor felt satisfying, in what must be the same way that some people find power-washing to be satisfying. The music is also good; more than anything else, it motivated me to keep my castle in good condition, so that I would deserve to hear more of it.

It's all a doomed endeavor, unfortunately. There is simply too much area to cover, and too many foxes within that area for a single slow-moving snake to deal with. Sooner rather than later, your castle's defenses will be overwhelmed, leaving your snake entirely impotent. I wish there were a proper "game over" or failure condition rather than simply being left hanging with no way to regenerate your colour meter. Or that the foxes whose colour you've restored could aid your castle's defenses somehow.

What this game needs is some indicator of progress apart from the score, and some measurable objectives apart from just defense until death. That is to say, I'd enjoy playing a game that is winnable, or at least one where losing is not so inevitable.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical None Technical None Genre None