Super fun. Instantly hooked and amazing soundtrack.Can we get a Hockey one next?
Reviews for "Portal Defenders: Fast Break!"
good game just hard controls
balln
baskemth ball good :)
NOTE: this review comes from someone who only played singleplayer, and doesn't fancy sports games that much beyond NBA Jam or NFL Blitz.
Hrmm, this was surprisingly a really, really rough one for me! I want to give this game a lot of props as it does a lot of things right, but there were some pretty severe annoyances with my experience that really soured me on it, making it feel like an unfortunately style-over-substance situation!
As said, I think there's a lot of good things to say about this game. In fact, there's so much right it's almost difficult to even describe as the list would just go on and on and I don't wanna bore you to tears. The entire game itself just feels immaculate and professionally put together in practically every aspect. It just exudes charm, and I'm not even talking about just the superficial things like graphics and music (which are great), as the professional touch even extends to the game feel of playing basketball and navigating the menus and reading inputs and so on and so forth. I also appreciate that the game mixes things up in the levels as you go on, as if it were just the same game of basketball but with new characters, I could imagine it getting boring very quickly.
But I unexpectedly spent a lot of my time playing the game feeling very lost and confused. As much as the game teaches you how to shoot with a nice little tutorial, and it does tell you the buttons you have to work with, it leaves a lot up in the air. For example, I didn't know why I wasn't able to attack people anymore until I eventually noticed it was controlled by a bar: why is this the case and how do I get bar back? Plus, even despite teaching me to shoot, I could never tell if I was doing the timing right or wrong as it just felt random when it decided to go in and I didn't know whether that was on me or RNG or other factors I'm not considering. Same for blocking: I kept trying over and over to block people but nothing would work despite my best efforts (maybe it's because with such small collision between players it's difficult to judge where to stand to be in front of them and, well, block them?) I kinda wish Referee Tom would actually give some actual gameplay hints instead of just talking about their cat: I like a good joke, but I'm lost here and could use some actual help! I know I'm probably just supposed to follow instincts and treat it as a party game and accept that RNG is involved to make the game work, but I had a tough time doing that: I'll accept that part of that might be on me.
Moving on from that, there were a lot of confusing and annoying design decisions. Whenever I passed to my partner, I would've much preferred if I was able to automatically swap to control my partner: the fact that they remain as a CPU even then felt very awkward and they'd generally do some dumb stuff like just pass it right back to me: made it feel pointless and unable to pull off any strategy through passing. Likewise, it was super frustrating that I couldn't swap to my partner at any time either in general: so many times they'd be closer to where the ball is and I'd be far away and unable to do anything and just feel so helpless. I spoke previously about having difficulty blocking, well, that was only because I was trying to properly block, as once I started goaltending, blocking was a breeze! There's a reason goaltending is illegal and I can't believe this game doesn't prevent that, as it completely breaks the difficulty of the game in half! Speaking of breaking the difficulty, I feel like the 'on fire' buff (which I don't even know how it happens) is way too overpowered as it just seems to last indefinitely and makes every shot 100% guaranteed: there's just no way for the enemy to come back from that! There were also just some weird glitches like the ball teleporting for some reason.
I could go on with other issues, but I'll admit that in spite of it all, the game is still pretty fun, albeit maybe not quite fun enough to make me go through the entire story campaign as while it does make an effort to mix things up every level, it's not quite enough especially considering how simple the gameplay is. I still think the game is something to be proud of and a very impressive endeavor overall: just had a bit of a rocky first impression that left both a powerful positive and negative impression!
As a side note! I loved the feel of attacking players and it gave nice flashbacks to games of the past: maybe make a beat-em-up in future? Haha!
BoMToons responds:
Good review! We've actually made a few beatemups in the past, you should check our profiles! In fact, this is a sequel to a beatemup called "Portal Defenders" from the early 2000s!
Tom's quotes cycle and he does have good hints in there about how "on fire" works and "turbo" usage. But we've heard the feedback from you and many others about the need for a better tutorial, so we're working on that. Stay tuned!
In single player mode, I'll also see how easy it would be to swap control when you pass... should be possible!
Shooting accuracy is actually affected by a few things:
1. The "base" accuracy of your player
2. How close you get to "releasing" your shot at the exact apex of your shot
3. If turbo is being held down while shooting (and you have turbo to use)
4. If you're "on fire" your accuracy goes way up, but it's not "perfect"
5. Your distance from the basket
If you can capture the ball disappearing in a video, please send it over. I thought I had squashed the bugs around that in the latest versions, but there might be more bugs lingering.