Score: 6
"DOORS! D:<"
date: June 23, 2008
Standard gameplay like any other adventureish stuff, with good potential but has some problems.
1) As many other have said, finding doors is seriously the most annoying aspect of the game. In the West Wing I was unable to find two of the four doors on the left hand side, so I searched the whole map available to me at the time to find a key...twice. This was incredibly time wasting and not too fun.
To fix this, please MARK with arrows or some overhead symbol for doorways. With green wallpaper and green doors and overhead view the doors are camouflaged. Other wallpaper designs also appear to look like a door but is not. Also if you're directly next to the wall, the camera angle is complete vertical thus impossible to find doors. This MUST be fixed.
2) Second, motion is awkward. Arrow keys are fine, but also could have had WASD key. He felt extremely sluggish, especially if you walked into objects and had to maneuver around. This problem was the most apparent when zombies were about and you had to AIM and squeeze off shots, or in the case of reloading, turn around, run, reload, turn around, walk backwards, aim, and shoot. Because aligning a shot is pretty hard (with slow turning), maybe auto-aim (within reasonable directional aim) would be better.
3) Third, please allow people to review instructions instead of showing it once and be done with it. A pop-up instruction box would be nice. In my encounter with my first zombie, I kept pressing s (which was actually reload), but was actually Z+X for firing the revolver. I took a lot of hits on that one. Crowbar(?) and general attack is awkward also, the Z+X combination. Would have been better for Z = general action, X = fire weapon, [SPACE] = switch weapon, and R = reload. (not sure for other commands, I died pretty early.) Or mouse aim would be nice.
4) Along with that, please give us a health bar so we know how much damage our guy can take. I think it's six zombie slashes, but I would like to know when I'm about to die.
5) Going through doors when zombie is chasing. When you enter a new room, the zombie stays in the doorway and waits. If you were to reload, and then re-attack, the zombie gets free hits on you as you try to reenter the room, because 1) he's in your way, 2) you're surrounded by black and is in neither room. This needs to be fixed somehow.
6) Still reloading issue, as others have said. This is how I lost to the second zombie in the East Wing.
7) Reading through the pages was annoying. Please fix the controls to give readers greater amounts of freedom (going back a page).
8) Map function of explored rooms. If I can guess, the whole layout is MASSIVE with lots of locked doors; might want to help out the player instead of him wandering about.
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Because I died pretty early, I can't really give a critique of the storyline. The feel of the game is rather slow mostly because of sluggish movements and the search-and-find element. The time spent finding doors didn't help much either. Overall, graphics are rather nice (other than wallpaper/door lookalike), although I find it odd for a few small pieces of furniture in a massive mansion. The atmosphere is well done, as well as the 'surprise!' in the first zombie encounter. Movement and camera angle is horrid.
These few technical aspects plague this game from being suspenseful and fun to being rather frustrating and annoyed, so you earned a 6/10 for its potential. If the above points are addressed, I'd be more willing to give it a replay and go through the whole plot.
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Also, I believe the word you're looking for is "colleague", not "college". This error is repeated a few times throughout the game and in the above description.
June 23, 2008
Author's Response:
Thanks alot for the feedback.
I fixed some of the issues, the details are in the description.
