Average, but with tweaks could go further
I like this game for the actual entertainment, and it is good to see that you improved from the last version of this game. However, it also seems like you used one new whole version and you didn’t actually improve as much as you should have, you didn’t change an awful lot. This is an average game, it’s just a shame you overlooked some improvements that could be made in both it’s and there are still many tweaks that should be made before you brought out a third (if you choose to do so) and final version….
First off, graphics. To be honest, this was nothing special and is merely average if that. I liked the menu screen with you way you faded the menu screen with the blue colour. I thought the game would look a little better, and to be honest I got the impression throughout the game that you couldn’t be bothered to fill the whole screen, for example extremely large portions of the menu screen and game over screen were white. The ‘game over’ screen looked very sloppy, and this just gave out a feeling of laziness, and gives the player an impression that you didn’t put enough effort as you could have. For example, there seemed to be a lack of graphics even in the actual game screen, which was a little disappointing. The maze strip only covered about a 3rd of the screen and the rest was just a white screen, even the background of the maze screen was a plain black colour. Hardly anything like eye-candy is it? I was also surprised to find that even in the maze you did draw the tiles were plain white, matching about 75% of the rest of the screen. Obviously I suggest that you try to improve on the graphical area of your flash so there isn’t so much a lack of graphics. Go wild! Add a funky background to the game, try and make it patterned and exciting or treasure colours and pictures such as gold and rubies, to match the theme of the game. Try to also blow up the size of the map a bit and make it cover the whole screen; this would improve the presentation of “Treasure assault” and would prevent the game appearing a little sloppy and more organized. Take advantage of this, you could make more pathways twisting and turning and more enemies, I would rather have a few large screens for the whole game rather than a lot more smaller and only half as good ones. Create more complex enemies and hazards such as crushing spikes and some more crazy power-ups. I wasn’t too impressed with the animation because it was a little simple, try to make the back kegs of your character move, and make an animation when you shoot an enemy rather than it just suddenly disappearing -the characters looked and move much too plain. Try to make them more imaginative, and make the treasure look more than gold blobs.
Next, sound. Pretty amusing and I think that song was one of he most hilarious I have ever heard – I love the way you changed the words into something about ebay, whilst keeping the exact same timing and tune as the original song. However it did get repetitive so I would suggest adding a mute button, and also the song ends after a while so make it loop around. I would also like to see some sound effects in this such as when you shoot enemies or collect a piece of treasure.
Finally, gameplay. Definitely the core aspect. I liked the way how you made this into a classic ‘treasure hunt’ puzzler but also it was interesting how you did it. For example, instead of just moving around in all directions like you normally do with this kind of ‘board appearance’ game, we had to jump about and climb up ladders. This was interesting because at first I didn’t think we’d get to move about in this way because of the way the maze was set out. There were times though that the game was very frustrating because of some near impossible jumps I had to make, but I guess that just adds to the challenge.
Overall, where graphics fall this game makes up for in gameplay. I do feel though not enough was changed in a whole version and that this is merely an average game, but it has good replay value and with some tweaks should go a lot further.
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~T_C