Recent reviews by Wiggles

Countering the negative review bomb.

Actually enjoyed this game too.

Absolutely no packages were delivered...

Nominated for 'best alternate history'. How could it not be?

Before even starting the game, I realized that the character creation was pretty lacking, with very few options and the ones that were available were pretty ♥♥♥♥. I settled with my bright pink neanderthal with a mohawk and jumped in to the world. You start out next to a charred skeleton, some starting gear and a book which you can read and learn a bit of the back story to the area of the game. I have mixed feelings about these books. I feel like the guy who designed this feature is one of those people who reads the quest giver text in MMO's. Seriously who the ♥♥♥♥ does that? It is kinda dull to stop and read a lot of text, especially if you are freezing your ass off and slowly dying of hunger. But there are some certain situations in the game that make this kinda cool - I'll explain more on that later. You quickly learn that you are on a snow covered island where you need to hunt for food, keep warm and ideally build shelters and better armor and weapons to progress to new areas of the island. I do like the idea of progression, with enemies further in the game getting tougher and requiring you to fully explore each crafting tier before moving on or potentially getting your head beaten in by a Silver Surfer or mini Maokai. But it does make it a tiny bit grind-ish by forcing you to collect a large number of materials to make the required gear. This is made even worse if you are playing co-op or in a group as the mining nodes have set locations and respawn times, so you may end up fighting each other for them or having to wait. We did find one solution to quickly get some crafting materials early in the game. You can build houses and shelters to keep yourself warm and your items safe and there are a few little pre-generated unfinished villages around the map. One creative way to keep yourself warm is that you can actually set these half-built houses on fire! Not only that but after they burn down they spew out precious resources that you can then re-use to make armor or new houses.

As with most survival games, you get thrown in to the game with very little explanation of what to do. Luckily the intro to the game has been very carefully set up. There is a small town within view that you can head over to and easily figure out that these buildings are incomplete and you need to craft nails and wooden boards to finish them off. The wooden boards are easily - make axe, cut trees, get wood, make boards. The nails took us a bit longer to figure out.. You can click on the item in the crafting window and it tells you what items you need to craft it. You need tin to make nails, you need a smelter to make tin from tin ore and coal.. but where the ♥♥♥♥ do you get tin ore and coal! We eventually noticed some ore deposits around the place, where you can get tin, coal, etc. But we had no idea how to mine them! Turns out, the tool required for mining is a Hammer. Why the ♥♥♥♥ a hammer.. c'mon. I think there are two things to do to help new players here; Firstly, the text on the item that says "Used for Mining" is the same color as the rest of the flavor text and blends in. Perhaps making it a different colour would help new players spot what it's used for. Secondly, don't make it a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hammer! What's wrong with pickaxe?

Shortly after settling down in our ♥♥♥♥♥♥ village, we were filled with a sense of dread after hearing loud roars in the distance and after looking up seeing a big ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dragon breathing fire on a tower. Now i've read other people's accounts and apparently the dragon has come and laid waste to them all, but even after shooting arrows at him in an attempt to piss him off he still hasn't paid us a visit. I have always been one to take on a challenge, so the big ass dragon is kinda a cool feature. It makes me want to get better gear and slay that ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Behind the village is a little cotton farm which you can harvest to make bandages. I think its explosive cotton because the sound effect when you harvest it sounds like small explosions. Luckily there is enough cotton to make a comfortable number of bandages for two people, but tough ♥♥♥♥ if you are playing in a larger group. Again, you may need to turn your volume down or risk becoming permanently deaf as crafting the bandages sounds like metal banging together inside your ear drum. Food on the starting island quickly runs out, forcing you to move on to the next main island where you are met with a sharp increase in the level of challenge the game offers. You are soon surrounded by tasty antelope and rabbits that you can eat, but also giant blue cats and skeletons that can eat you. The AI is a bit frustrating here because if you stand still you can see that all of the enemies are slowly gravitating towards you.. eventually getting close enough to sprint at you and wreck your day. Luckily they attack slowly, because if they hit you you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥. You can only take one or two hits because most likely you skipped the tin and copper tier armor because there is just not enough ores on the starting island to make them!

We eventually stumbled upon a little town that was completely built! It made us wonder why the ♥♥♥♥ we built up the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ town when we could have just lived here. We grabbed all of our loot from the old place and moved in, even though it felt a little too good to be true. We noticed that there was one of those books that we never read in the town so we decided to read it. It explained that the previous villagers had all evacuated because the town was haunted and that something still lingered. Well, ♥♥♥♥. Sure enough, that night the town filled up with ghost skeletons that wanted to put their cold bony fingers in our butt holes. ♥♥♥♥ it, too late, we settled. We have just accepted the fact that we have to brawl skeletons each night. After gathering up enough food to survive and ores to make bronze armor, we went for a wander. We found giant trees that wanted to eat us, green lumberjacks, Gollum, Shrek and a really cool teleporting doorway! It looked like you were going in to some ruins but when you went through you were actually on the other side of the map in another ruins. It's actually a pretty awesome feature! All of these cool little finds makes me want to explore the game even more.

Apart from the pretty buggy AI, teleporting enemies, characters glitching through the floor, getting stuck on terrain, terrible sound effects, character animation being really ♥♥♥♥.. the game actually has some very solid game play. I think it does have a fair way to go but looking back at other games like Minecraft and Rust that looked ♥♥♥♥♥♥, but actually had solid game play.. Those games have come a long way and are now really awesome. I think that with a bit of attention this game could definitely be one to look out for. If you want to jump on the bandwagon early then you can grab it at an awesome price right now on the Humble Bundle website. Definitely advise checking it out if you have the time to play as it does take a little bit of time to get in to.

The more I played this game, the more it felt like Wonderboy. But that's not exactly a compliment. What I mean is, the controls are a bit clunky for a platformer, but once you get used to them the game is not half bad, considering I got it for $0.16 in those Steam auctions. I decided to finish it and review it anyway.

Unfortunately the game is backwards! The first world is not really engaging, the sound track chiptune eats away at your brain and the first boss is unnecessarily frustrating. Admittedly the game does get better as you play in to it, as I will explain in detail in a second, but I have to ask why... why not engage the players early? Oh well. Probably why it was $0.16. I'll get all the bad things out of the way first.. but where do I start? Ok, let's start with probably my biggest peeve, the "secret" areas. I put secret in quotation marks because well they aren't really that secret. They're ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ everywhere! There are probably 5 or so secrets per level, 8 levels per world, 5 worlds. That's a ♥♥♥♥ tonne of secret areas, you kinda get tired of them after a little while. Mainly because the rewards in them are often petty or you are forced to risk your life or fight a ♥♥♥♥ tonne of enemies to get to a chance of a good reward. Yeah ♥♥♥♥ that. I learnt quickly to skip the secrets. But sometimes you can't skip them! There were times where you see a ledge, and you jump, and then, ohhh ♥♥♥♥ invisible wall - you're dead. Mother ♥♥♥♥♥♥..

What next? The bugs? After collecting a token and entering a secret world where sprint is disabled, when you get back to the main game, sprinting and shooting is still disabled. You have to quit the game and re-open your save file to be able to do it again. How did they miss that? Actually it kinda made the game more fun and challenging the first time it happened. I thought it was intentional, and played the level without shooting. It made me realize that the power-ups are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid and overpowered. There's also a few collision detection bugs, which you do NOT want in a platformer. There were times where things did not even touch me, but they still killed me. Other times where I quite literally dodged a bullet, because the bullet hitboxes are so tiny, they can sometimes pass right through you and not hurt you. In parts where you aren't meant to control your character, you can still press the down and left key, making your character moonwalk or butt-slide. Not game breaking, more humorous actually.

Artwork! Now this is gonna be a bit of a mixed answer. I loved and hated it. I loved the art style on the enemies and some parts of the map, they were really detailed. However, other parts of the map objects and the main character sprite were really lacking. They looked a bit rushed. If you take a look at this video I made of the world 5 boss fight you can see what I mean. The boss is really detailed but some other things like the player, the flag, the user interface are really poorly done. They just don't sit well next to each other and just give the overall look of it being put together a bit quickly. Some improvement here and with the clunky gameplay would have really improved this game substantially.

Alright, better talk about some things that were enjoyable. A lot of the mechanics were ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ god awful like the inverse Mario style blocks that broke when you jump on them or cactus enemies that hide behind other cacti so you can't see them. They're also introduced so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ poorly, you don't even know it's coming - it just hits you. You are meant to let players learn new ♥♥♥♥ before just throwing it at them! ♥♥♥♥! Ok, meant to be saying nice things. Some mechanics were cool.. I was really impressed with the sinking sand in world 2. I actually really liked where they took that. I was actually thinking "hey they should have a level where you race the sinking sand" and lo and behold, 2 levels later they did it! The snow world was a bit cooler too. Lots of new stuff implemented here, the guys throwing the snow balls were pretty cool, although if you had max power ups you could wreck them pretty easily. The boss fights got more fun as the game progressed too, which was nice because I nearly quit the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game after World 2's boss fight cause it was so infuriating.. The map design in the final world was really fun in a not-too-easy but still challenging way.Where the rest of the game was either easy, or ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Last world was right in the middle. This may have been because I was slowly getting used to the awkward controls, but hey, that's old school game progression for you, right?

Overall verdict - it was worth what I paid? I guess?

It's actually not a bad game considering it was just over $1. It is a little bit buggy in some parts and does need a little bit of polish, mainly the co-op mode crashing where only the host can do anything and the rest stand still. Also the aiming is a bit rough, presumably because it is adapted from a console game. Other than that, it's a great game to play to just blow off steam and have a few laughs with mates. It's not a game you can take too seriously and have to really concentrate to play, so you can pretty much just mindlessly blast your way through hordes of the undead. It's not that exciting to play alone, in fact it's quite painful as the game doesn't scale when you play a map with 1 player or 4. The progression is kind of fun, you unlock new guns and upgrades every few levels so that does encourage a fair bit of replay value, but unfortunately there are only a handful of maps to actually play on so it does get repetitive. The repetition is broken up by little challenges that appear in each zone which do different things, sometimes giving you buffs like infinite ammo, or make it tougher by having 1 invincible enemy or turning friendly fire on.