Recent reviews by ahbeef

i love boink game its so awesome

this is a really fantastic mini-metroidvania, easily completable 100% in about 2-4 hours, and way faster than that when you know what you're doing. it has a lot of really interesting design with its secrets and extra abilities that make for high replayability, which is great for this genre. the level design is pretty tight as well, with each room having unique platforming challenges and item puzzles, and every area manages to feel unique in its design. the story is cool if i have any complaints here, it's a minor lack of polish, the game is a bit janky, but it's nothing game breaking unless you're going out of your way to sequence break. this is easily the developer's best designed game, making for a fun casual experience and a very rewarding speedrun experience for those looking to get extra replay value out of it. if you enjoy metroidvanias at all, please play this game!

just want to leave a sincere thank you to the developers for so faithfully and lovingly bringing back these classic games. i LOVED achievement unlocked when i was a kid, so playing it again after all these years as well as getting to play the sequels and all these other cool games i never played is really cool! especially now that flash is dead, playing these games the way they were originally intended is really difficult, and this is about as close as it gets. the only complaint i have is a few bugs. i'm not sure if they were intentionally kept in from the originals or are new to the collection, but i had a really nasty but in AE3 where upon triggering the ending, my save file bugged out and reverted my progress but saved most of the achievements i got, making it impossible to progress and 100% the game without starting over entirely. i've also heard about some crashes from others, but i only experienced one in my 10 hours of playtime. hopefully these can be ironed out, because aside from that i really have no complaints about this collection. the price tag may seem a bit high for a collection of flash games, but they hold up very well, and i can easily recommend it!

yeah it's pretty good i think

INSANELY good movement. seriously some of the best controls in any 3D platformer i've ever played. the devs should be very proud! i really can't overstate just how satisfying it feels to move around quickly, there's so much depth and nuance to the movement that i'm sure speedruns of this game will be INSANE. i might even try it out myself!

i do have some small issues though that i felt were worth mentioning in case the devs are reading the reviews for feedback. the biggest issue is that the game doesn't have a map at all. the world is small enough that you can keep track of it in your head decently well, but there are some really mazey areas and different areas weave in and out of each other a lot so it can be hard to keep track of it all sometimes. a map would be VERY helpful in figuring out how everything connects as well as for tracking collectibles you might've missed.

that brings me to the other main issue; there's no completion tracking. i know i missed at least a couple things but i have no idea just how much i missed, or where to find them. it feels a little disappointing leaving the game unfinished but i just don't know where to find my missing collectibles, or even when i'd found them all. hoping for these features to be added in an update.

other than that, the game is fantastic and well worth the 6 bucks!

we love katamari! we really do!

this is TERRIBLE. first of all, it is not even CLOSE to a recreation of the classic text twist web game. sure, it had six letters that you have to unscramble, but that's where the similarities end. there's a reason for that, but i'll get into it towards the end of the review.

you get two modes, timed and untimed. timed gives you two minutes to try and fill in all the words, and your high score is saved at the end of the two minutes. untimed lets you fill in the whole board with no time limit. untimed doesn't really work that well because once you finish a board it doesn't do anything. no new board with new letters, no congratulations screen, nothing. timed mode doesn't work because the score system gets broken if you bother with untimed mode even once. for some reason, your score is saved in untimed mode as well, and it only shows one singular score on the menu, rather than a different score for both modes. that means you can play untimed once, get the max score of 27000, quit to the menu, and then going for high scores in timed mode becomes pointless.

on top of that, they somehow screwed the basic gameplay of text twist in this version. for one, there are so few boards that i ran into repeats multiple times in my meager 30 minutes of gameplay. either i got REALLY unlucky or there just aren't that many sets for the game to randomly choose from. second, and worst of all, are the boards you fill in. plain and simple, they suck. not all words that are possible to make from a set of letters are used in any given board. that doesn't mean you can just pick however many words you can think of to fill them in, no no no, that would actually make sense. instead they have VERY SPECIFIC words that can be used. that means that some real obvious, basic words just will not work when you try them. this issue is most prevalent with three letter words, but there were a few examples of four or even five letter words that didn't work either. on top of all that, you can't even use the six letter word, despite every single set having a six letter word that you could make.

so what happens in a typical timed game is you type in the six letter word, and nothing happens because theres no spot for it. then, you type in a bunch of three and four letter words, only to realize some of the ones you put in didn't work. you try them again, and they still don't work, because for some reason, they just aren't in the game's word library. so you're like "well what else am i supposed to fill in here?" and you start typing every three letter combination you possibly can, and still end up missing a few because despite some obvious real words not being included, it's also filled with those obscure words you've never heard of. stuff like "aal". but sure, "yaw", a basic terminology in airplanes, doesn't count, or even "mobile", which is pretty ironic. then you run out of time with a pretty middling score, only for it to not matter beacuse you already maxed out the high score with an untimed game a while ago. then you start a new game and get a board you've already seen before and STILL can't fill it all in.

as if somehow butchering the gameplay of something as simple as text twist wasn't bad enough, the presentation also sucks. UI that looks like it was made for a mobile game in a 2023 PC release, super generic looking black times new roman text with no outlines or anything, no video options (not even a fullscreen toggle), letters get stuck if you start typing in words before they finish shuffling, and one ambient looping song that sounds oddly stressful. the charm of the REAL classic text twist is not present in this port, nor is the quality gameplay or variety. i loved classic text twist as a kid, and was excited when i saw it was coming to steam, but, despite the name, classic text twist this is not.

in fact, after looking into it a little more, i found out why this bares such little resemblance to the classic text twist it gets its name from. this is actually a port of a 2011 mobile game called Text Twist 2, which explains the funky UI.

Devs, if you're reading this, please be honest here. i feel like i got tricked into buying what i thought was going to be something completely different from what i got. if you had called this "Text Twist 2", which you should've, since that's what it is, then i wouldn't have gone into this game expecting a port of the original text twist. if it's possible to do so, please change the game's name on steam and update it to show the game's original title.

a classic game finally on PC with a nice new low res art style and some minor gameplay improvements, but otherwise it's the same "the letter" you know from wii u

MASSIVE disappointment. As someone who loved Glover as a kid, I was really excited to finally play through it again with modern enhancements, but the only positive change to this "remaster" is widescreen. No controller customization, buggy achievements, and the game still runs at 20 fps. You CAN increase the framerate by messing with a config file, which sounds asinine until you realize that increasing the framerate completely breaks the game. They couldn't even be bothered to rewrite parts of the code that were tied to framerate so the game could work at a higher fps. The physics get totally screwed up and some of the bonus levels are COMPLETELY unplayable, so it's no wonder they hid the option away in some random config file. As if that wasn't bad enough, there are a number of bugs that weren't present in the N64 original, such as missing graphics, screwed up sound effects, enemies' dead bodies staying loaded even after the enemies respawn when you die, altered hitboxes, and more. For example, the prehistoric bonus level is damn near impossible now thanks to the Garibs' hitboxes being made smaller. In the N64 version, you could just roll on through the stage picking up every Garib without any issue, but here you have to jump to reach the hitbox for some of them, which obviously slows you down. When you have a giant insta kill wall of lava chasing you, you can't afford to slow down. I eventually did it after an hour of practice and rote memorization, but if I were playing on N64 it would've taken me all of 5 minutes. At the end of the day, I'm not sure why Piko even bothered with the Glover IP in the first place if they were just gonna sit on it for years only to ♥♥♥♥ out a half-assed port and call it a day. Glover deserves better.

this is genuinely the worst game i've ever played in my life. it's ugly as hell, controls like garbage, buggy beyond words, extremely bare on content, ad made up of nothing but stock unity assets and music. ♥♥♥♥ this game and all the people leaving ironic positive reviews. you people are a big part of why steam is such a dumpster fire of awful lazy games like this. also, if you do buy this game you are supporting a developer that has been known to create awful asset flips so keep that in mind if you're still thinking of buying this trash. this is so offensively awful that it deserves to be removed from the steam store completely.