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NovemberJoy
09-27-16 11:42 PM
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NovemberJoy
09-27-16 11:42 PM
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A nice effort defeated by poor decisions

 
Game's Ratings
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Sound
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NovemberJoy's Score
4
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09-27-16 11:42 PM
NovemberJoy is Offline
| ID: 1303688 | 1394 Words

NovemberJoy
Level: 78


POSTS: 1209/1587
POST EXP: 161606
LVL EXP: 4316497
CP: 11611.5
VIZ: 514180

Likes: 1  Dislikes: 0
Homebrew games are tricky to review. On one hand, most of them would receive lower scores than most official games, due to the amateurish nature of most homebrew games. On the other hand, you also have to consider the fact that they're typically developed by tiny teams as a hobby, not expecting any kind of pay for their work. Personally, I just try to rate them based on how they are as games, without focusing too much on the homebrew part - in most cases, people who can make a game that works on NES hardware should have the skill to make a decent game. How does this game stack up?

Even for a homebrew, the graphics aren't particularly impressive. They look very dull and not particularly detailed, and the animations are simple at best. Even though the graphics aren't very impressive, that doesn't stop the developer from reusing them - the ruins area has the exact same graphics as the cave area, just with a few different tiles and a palette swap. Is it really that hard to draw bricks? If you can design graphics like the ones found elsewhere in this game, you should be able to draw bricks, which leads me to believe that the developer was just feeling a bit lazy.

The music and sound are kinda just there. They provide okay background noise to put against the gameplay, but that's about it. The only track that was memorable was the overworld theme, and that's only because I heard it so often. The music doesn't take very long to loop, either, and there aren't enough tracks in the game for it to not get very repetitive. The sound is very similar - nothing really stood out to me at all, and some actions that should have sound effects don't for some reason. Watching your main character slowly and silently lift into the air is slightly amusing.

Storywise, it's pretty standard for an NES game. An evil wizard named Amondus creates a massive palace in the sky and fills Hekl's homeland with evil, and he has to save it. He also did the smart thing and stole all of Hekl's scrolls and most of his magic abilities, leaving him extremely weak and sluggish. Honestly, though, I really don't think Hekl's homeland was worth conquering. There isn't a single sign of human life anywhere in this entire place aside from the eeeeeevil palace and Hekl's tiny house. Was there any conquering going on here in the first place? It looks to me like he just moved in on some land that nobody bothered to live in but Hekl.

It's a fairly standard flip-screen platformer with exploration and item-collecting which reminds me a lot of Metroid. Yes, you read that right, a flip-screen platformer on the NES! Most games on the NES took advantage of the hardware's natural ability to scroll smoothly without making it look jerky or weird, but that was apparently too much work for the developer of this game. As a result, you get a game that uses mechanics that were outdated when the NES first came out. The abrupt switch from one screen to another is annoying, and it can cause numerous gameplay problems. At one point, I walked off the edge of one screen, thinking there's be solid ground on the next screen, but there wasn't, and I ended up falling instead. In some cases, you'll come off of one screen and appear right on top of an enemy, leading to unavoidable damage! If you're going to have flip-screen gameplay, you should at least bother to test it first to avoid problems like this.

The game also has a bad habit of not giving even the slightest hint towards your next destination. In most games of this type, it's not that bad because your abilities are decent enough that wandering around isn't too much of a chore, and you can usually figure out what abilities to use in which areas. In this game, however, your character starts off very slow and very weak, and doesn't gain any decent amount of mobility or attack power until you defeat a boss and do quite a bit of wandering around, which is very tedious when your character is so sluggish and weak. I know he's supposed to be a wizard, but seriously? I could be a better hero than this guy!

It's not an easy game, sure, but it's difficult in the wrong way. For starters, even though this is a fairly open game world that you have to explore, you're never given even the slightest clue as to your next destination, which means you have to do a lot of wandering around to see if you missed anything or if there's something you can do that you couldn't do earlier. This leads to the next problem: when you're wandering around so much, you're bound to take a few hits, and there's no way to get extra lives or replenish your limited supply of health. No matter how far you go, if you run out of lives, you're taken all the way back to the beginning area of the game, so it's sometimes more time-efficient to commit suicide so you can go into a new area with as many resources as you can. I didn't want it to be as linear and easy as Call of Duty, but isn't this going a bit too far?

It's also difficult because of the controls. Now, they're not all that bad - they're fairly logical, and also fairly responsive. The main problem is your mid-air mobility. In this game, instead of jumping, your main character levitates instead. It's an interesting idea on paper, but it was executed very poorly. When you start off the game, your levitation is so slow and useless that it makes the game a complete chore to play. It takes two seconds to get to your peak height, and it takes even longer if you want to move while in mid-air. I literally can't think of a single game where your mid-air capabilities are so utterly crippled that isn't this one! As an added slap to the face, you can actually upgrade your levitation speed! As soon as I found the upgrade, the only thing that came to my mind was "Why couldn't I have this level of speed before?" I never asked to play a game where you move slower than molasses in January until you get an hour or two into the game.

All of this comes together to form one of the worst boss fights I think I've ever experienced in an NES game. Charwit looks like a very plain boss fight, but it's actually poorly-designed in quite a few ways. First of all, the boss flies around at a moderate speed. In any other game, this wouldn't be a problem, but remember how it takes two full seconds to finish levitating? Yeah, that's what you have to do to avoid getting hit. What about hitting the boss, though? That's where the next problem comes in - your bog-standard attack has a limited range, and that range just happens to be roughly the same distance where you need to start levitating or take a hit from Charwit when it passes. You can only hit the boss once per pass if you don't want to get hit in the process, which means you're in for a boss that takes several minutes to fight and never bothers to change up its pattern - it swoops along the ground, shoots from above, and shoots above your head before repeating the process. Is this supposed to be fun? This is one of the best examples of anti-fun I've found in any game.

Overall, it's a good effort that falls short in many different ways. I honestly didn't feel the drive to complete this game, but I'm guessing it doesn't get much better as you go on. The graphics and sound are below average, the storyline doesn't match up very well with the gameplay, and the gameplay itself has quite a few flaws that keep it from shining in any aspect. I would recommend you avoid this game, even if you're itching to play a Metroid-style platformer. There's plenty of great alternatives.

Overall Score: 4 cups of homebrewed coffee out of 10
Homebrew games are tricky to review. On one hand, most of them would receive lower scores than most official games, due to the amateurish nature of most homebrew games. On the other hand, you also have to consider the fact that they're typically developed by tiny teams as a hobby, not expecting any kind of pay for their work. Personally, I just try to rate them based on how they are as games, without focusing too much on the homebrew part - in most cases, people who can make a game that works on NES hardware should have the skill to make a decent game. How does this game stack up?

Even for a homebrew, the graphics aren't particularly impressive. They look very dull and not particularly detailed, and the animations are simple at best. Even though the graphics aren't very impressive, that doesn't stop the developer from reusing them - the ruins area has the exact same graphics as the cave area, just with a few different tiles and a palette swap. Is it really that hard to draw bricks? If you can design graphics like the ones found elsewhere in this game, you should be able to draw bricks, which leads me to believe that the developer was just feeling a bit lazy.

The music and sound are kinda just there. They provide okay background noise to put against the gameplay, but that's about it. The only track that was memorable was the overworld theme, and that's only because I heard it so often. The music doesn't take very long to loop, either, and there aren't enough tracks in the game for it to not get very repetitive. The sound is very similar - nothing really stood out to me at all, and some actions that should have sound effects don't for some reason. Watching your main character slowly and silently lift into the air is slightly amusing.

Storywise, it's pretty standard for an NES game. An evil wizard named Amondus creates a massive palace in the sky and fills Hekl's homeland with evil, and he has to save it. He also did the smart thing and stole all of Hekl's scrolls and most of his magic abilities, leaving him extremely weak and sluggish. Honestly, though, I really don't think Hekl's homeland was worth conquering. There isn't a single sign of human life anywhere in this entire place aside from the eeeeeevil palace and Hekl's tiny house. Was there any conquering going on here in the first place? It looks to me like he just moved in on some land that nobody bothered to live in but Hekl.

It's a fairly standard flip-screen platformer with exploration and item-collecting which reminds me a lot of Metroid. Yes, you read that right, a flip-screen platformer on the NES! Most games on the NES took advantage of the hardware's natural ability to scroll smoothly without making it look jerky or weird, but that was apparently too much work for the developer of this game. As a result, you get a game that uses mechanics that were outdated when the NES first came out. The abrupt switch from one screen to another is annoying, and it can cause numerous gameplay problems. At one point, I walked off the edge of one screen, thinking there's be solid ground on the next screen, but there wasn't, and I ended up falling instead. In some cases, you'll come off of one screen and appear right on top of an enemy, leading to unavoidable damage! If you're going to have flip-screen gameplay, you should at least bother to test it first to avoid problems like this.

The game also has a bad habit of not giving even the slightest hint towards your next destination. In most games of this type, it's not that bad because your abilities are decent enough that wandering around isn't too much of a chore, and you can usually figure out what abilities to use in which areas. In this game, however, your character starts off very slow and very weak, and doesn't gain any decent amount of mobility or attack power until you defeat a boss and do quite a bit of wandering around, which is very tedious when your character is so sluggish and weak. I know he's supposed to be a wizard, but seriously? I could be a better hero than this guy!

It's not an easy game, sure, but it's difficult in the wrong way. For starters, even though this is a fairly open game world that you have to explore, you're never given even the slightest clue as to your next destination, which means you have to do a lot of wandering around to see if you missed anything or if there's something you can do that you couldn't do earlier. This leads to the next problem: when you're wandering around so much, you're bound to take a few hits, and there's no way to get extra lives or replenish your limited supply of health. No matter how far you go, if you run out of lives, you're taken all the way back to the beginning area of the game, so it's sometimes more time-efficient to commit suicide so you can go into a new area with as many resources as you can. I didn't want it to be as linear and easy as Call of Duty, but isn't this going a bit too far?

It's also difficult because of the controls. Now, they're not all that bad - they're fairly logical, and also fairly responsive. The main problem is your mid-air mobility. In this game, instead of jumping, your main character levitates instead. It's an interesting idea on paper, but it was executed very poorly. When you start off the game, your levitation is so slow and useless that it makes the game a complete chore to play. It takes two seconds to get to your peak height, and it takes even longer if you want to move while in mid-air. I literally can't think of a single game where your mid-air capabilities are so utterly crippled that isn't this one! As an added slap to the face, you can actually upgrade your levitation speed! As soon as I found the upgrade, the only thing that came to my mind was "Why couldn't I have this level of speed before?" I never asked to play a game where you move slower than molasses in January until you get an hour or two into the game.

All of this comes together to form one of the worst boss fights I think I've ever experienced in an NES game. Charwit looks like a very plain boss fight, but it's actually poorly-designed in quite a few ways. First of all, the boss flies around at a moderate speed. In any other game, this wouldn't be a problem, but remember how it takes two full seconds to finish levitating? Yeah, that's what you have to do to avoid getting hit. What about hitting the boss, though? That's where the next problem comes in - your bog-standard attack has a limited range, and that range just happens to be roughly the same distance where you need to start levitating or take a hit from Charwit when it passes. You can only hit the boss once per pass if you don't want to get hit in the process, which means you're in for a boss that takes several minutes to fight and never bothers to change up its pattern - it swoops along the ground, shoots from above, and shoots above your head before repeating the process. Is this supposed to be fun? This is one of the best examples of anti-fun I've found in any game.

Overall, it's a good effort that falls short in many different ways. I honestly didn't feel the drive to complete this game, but I'm guessing it doesn't get much better as you go on. The graphics and sound are below average, the storyline doesn't match up very well with the gameplay, and the gameplay itself has quite a few flaws that keep it from shining in any aspect. I would recommend you avoid this game, even if you're itching to play a Metroid-style platformer. There's plenty of great alternatives.

Overall Score: 4 cups of homebrewed coffee out of 10
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