Recent reviews by Chatoten

Plastic Playground has some serious technical issues. I cannot imagine the developer not having encountered these issues in playtesting, and I have no idea why the game was allowed to be released with such game breaking problems. I try my best not to judge a game, especially one by a small studio, for technical problems, but I legitimately was not able to play the game. I was able to load a into a match with myself for a short amount of time, but anything more than that would cause the game to fail in one way or another.

There are two HUGE issues that completely ruin the game for me:

1. Trying to host a game with more than just myself would cause my game to crash. To be fair I did not extensively test different scenarios to see what was causing the problem, I only tried it with two online friends, but considering that many other reviews appear to be having the same issue I am not sure there is a fix.
   
2. There appears to be a rather serious memory leak issue. After about 7 minutes of being in a game alone, the only setup that ever worked for me, my framerate dropped considerably to around 15 FPS. Up until then the game ran perfectly fine, but unfortunately all I could do at that point was close the game and relaunch it.

I also had a few other minor issues, though I would have excused the game if these were the only issues:

1. I do not think an IP-based, peer-to-peer hosting system is ideal for this sort of game at all. This is one of the more serious issues (though not game breaking like the first two issues) because I feel this ruins any online component of the game beyond trying to play a game with a few friends. I do understand that any other system would have been considerably more expensive and complex, and I get that the developer probably intended for this game to played in a LAN party sort of setting, but a multiplayer only game needs players and the current setup drastiaclly limits the number of available players.
   
2. Control over a match you are hosting is very limited. You can only select a game type, a time limit and a score limit before the game starts; beyond that you have no control of the game whatsoever. You cannot kick players, call any sort of vote, or change/balance teams.
   
3. A player cannot join a game already in progress, even if that game is empty.
   
4. Very few graphical options, and you cannot modify them during a game.

The worst part of this whole situation is that I legitimately wanted to play the game with my friends, and I simply couldn't due to the technical issues this game has. The trailer looked fun, and I had fun playing with the mechanics of the game while I was alone in a game, but as soon as I tried to actually get to the real game everything just fell apart. I even commend the developer for trying to fix issues; I don't think the resolutions that have been created/recommended are that great, but there was effort put forth.

If the game was playable it could have been fun.

Quick Review: In Verbis Virtus does two things right: the visuals (mostly) and then the speaking mechanic. Unfortunately, I think nearly every other mechanic is either annoying or just dumb. The game should have been a pure puzzle game, but it does too much and fails.

• Using your voice to pick spells. This is literally the single best mechanic in the game. It works about 85-90% of the time, which may not sound great, but if the game had been a pure puzzle game that would not be an issue. In fact, I am fairly confident it could work in a game like Skyrim, where you have a little bit of leeway between enemy encounter and needing to be completely ready.
  
• You can switch between the game's made up language and English for the spells, though the English versions are a little long.
  
• The game will say the spells out loud to you if you need it.
  
• The visuals. Not very original, and the glowy particles hurt my eyes a few times, (especially the save points) but otherwise the game looks good.
  
• Not having mana. All mana would do is slow you down and make puzzles unbearable, I am glad it was not included.

• The atmosphere. It's dark fantasy, I guess. I wasn't actually paying too much attention, but there was magic, blood, and breasts. I can't say too much about the actual writing of the game, I skimmed through literally all of it, but the actual feel of the world is lackluster. It is very static, the only things that move are some rocks and the enemies, but most of the enemies take away from the experience so it doesn't matter.
  
• The controls, in theory. As long as you are not doing timed puzzles and there is nothing around to hurt you they work just fine.
  
• The spells. Like the visuals in that they were fancy, but not interesting. Not your average fantasy spells, but not very exciting either. I found a flashlight, a laser beam that you had to point directly at the puzzle object, a spell that was 100% contextual and just moved stuff for me, and a telekinesis spell that was dumb and clunky because it required two other phrases if you wanted to move things closer or further away.
  
• The music, probably. I didn't really listen to it, but it wasn't offensive.

• Having health. I guess the no mana guy went to lunch because I don't see any logical connection in getting rid of mana, but not health in a puzzle game. In an action game sure, but this game is supposed to be about puzzles. All losing health does is make the game arbitrarily more difficult. The enemies and puzzles are kept pretty much completely apart, it would have been best if the enemies were removed or made part of the environment instead of kept as a real barrier to progress.
  
• The controls, in practice. In order to beat the puzzles you have to be 100% on the target, and a lot of times it doesn't even make sense. Since the voice commands are only mostly accurate, having to really on quick reflexes is completely unfair because you can saying a command right but the game doesn't have to agree with you. In Verbis Virtus seems to be in on it too, spawning enemies to get rid of your health and then putting you in time trial death traps. This is infinitely compounded when you are using a controller. Sure, you can say "Just don't use a controller." but if the above issues were fixed it wouldn't be a problem. At best the controls in-game finicky and annoying.
  
• Story telling. It was either text dumps or cutscences, absolutely no atmospheric story telling. Okay okay, it isn't much reading, but the problem is you can ignore 95% of it with no problem until you run into a bad puzzle. This leads me into...
  
• The game is either too upfront or not helpful in the least. The story is in the first camp, but the puzzles are in the latter. One puzzle is literally this: stare at the floor, walk into a statue, and then stare at this statue without moving for like 5 seconds. That is an awful puzzle, and I only would have known if I had read the text logs, which was unnecessary until that point.
  
• Platforming. Not 100% awful, but overly difficult due to being in first person and just not necessary.
  
• The puzzles. This should have been pretty much the only element of the game, but it isn't. Had the developers spent more time on the puzzles and less time on everything else (except the speaking mechanic of course) then I this game would be such an easy sell. I am not big into puzzle games, not at all, but in my 80 minutes of playing the game (which appears to be about 1/4th of the game or less based on achievements) almost all the puzzles were either reflecting a lazer or using a spell on the contextual green spot, if they weren't simply unsolvable without googling the issue. There was one puzzle that involved using boxes to hold a door up that I liked, every other puzzle sucked.

All of these negatives culminated on one puzzle and I could not go on. This puzzle required super precise controls and two second timing, where if I failed I died because my health was pretty much zero, and what was my reward? A completely new and entirely obtuse enemy murdered me. I am legitimately not sure if I could even damage this guy, but if I could it would have required super accurate aiming on my part anyways. I had no old saves to load to because making new ones required me bending over to use my keyboard, and reloading my only save left me with almost zero health and no other way to proceed but that awful timing puzzle. I had no other option but to quit.

• The health bar should have been thrown away.
  
• The enemies needed to be fundamentally different. They could have added to the a lot to the atmosphere, made the world feel alive. If all of the enemies were like the bat enemies, where they don't directly attack, but you can interact (i.e. kill) with them things would be much better. At least let me scare off the bug swarms with the flashlight instead of having to ineffectively laser beam away individuals who are only one part of massive groups. It feels like the enemies are from Metroid: Prime and it does not work.
  
• Remove any puzzle that requires precise timing or aiming. Unfortunately, that was basically every puzzle I faced so the dev team would need to do a serious rehaul.
  
• Make changes to the graphics options apply without a restart. Also give me an option to get rid of flashing lights if there isn't already one.
  
• Make the story less ambiguous and get rid of most of the cutscenes, or add more atmospheric story telling.

I think the dev team lost focus of what they wanted to make. The game should have been either about puzzles or killing monsters, probably the former to be honest, but the way they mashed those two goals together doesn't work. In Verbis Virtus really is not that far away from a pretty good game, but the designers at Indomitus Games seem to lack discipline in their work. Actually, that probably isn't fair, maybe the publisher meddled too much or maybe the team had bigger ambitions and it fell flat; but in all honesty I'd rather see the spell selection mechanic sold to a bigger developer who could handle it better. I don't think In Verbis Virtus is worth your money. Maybe if you really want to check out the voice mechanic take a look, but don't spend more than five bucks.