Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Rev-view-view-views

Two reviews, both got pretty rough scores.

The first, Animal Kingdom: Wildlife Expedition is a massive exercise in not accommodating your design to the technical limitations of the platform. As a general rule of thumb, if the only way to play the game successfully (I'm not talking about dying and reloading) involves looking at a loading screen more than actual play, you have a problem. The title involved a lot of going in and out of zones to see if the right animal was in the right pose. This meant a lot of loading, looking about, then leaving, which meant more loading.

At some point it just hits critical mass and explodes.

Second one, A Witch's Tale was interesting because it might be one of the first truly bad JRPG's I've ever played. Generally games in this genre get a 7 or 6 out of me because by now most developers know what the game needs to produce. The plot doesn't need to be very clever since the design affords so much chatter and me watching cutscenes. Nothing particularly ludic is expected. Combat needs to be interesting and I suppose these days dying a lot is considered a good thing in JRPG's.

This game doesn't really do any of that. The plot is delivered by info-kiosks. Levels consist of walking around a giant map until you know what dungeon to start at. And combat...your character is so strong by level 10 that you literally spend most of the time trying to figure out how to make it be over faster.

It's a shame, it looked promising from the cover.

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