Dodge the Temple Guardians to collect waffles.“Plactoid” is a new creation coming from the GMC user duckman. By first impressions, this is a well-made and polished game. Player movement works pretty well, although I felt that collisions with spikes were a little too unforgiving. The game runs pretty smoothly, which is good as it is somewhat challenging. It’s always annoying when a hard game is filled with unpredictable bugs and bad controls – “I Wanna Be The Guy” comes to mind.
The levels are varied and they introduce new elements at a very reasonable pace. As far as features go, the game doesn’t try anything crazy, instead incorporating time-tested additions like spikes and power-ups. There are also two difficulty modes offered – something I wish more games would do. However, I felt like the difficulties were mislabeled. “Easy” felt more like “Normal” and “Hard” felt more like “Impossible”. I mostly played through “Easy” and thought the difficulty was very balanced, but not truly easy, and an easier mode would improve the game’s accessibility.
One thing that I noticed was the sparsity of textboxes. There are some awful creations I’ve played recently – “Colour [sic] My World” and “Iji,” namely – that explain every tiny detail of gameplay through text. There is none of that in Plactoid, and the game is much better for it. Granted, there are a couple of snippets of text at the beginning, but they add a little humor, and I didn’t mind them very much. “Plactoid” doesn’t assume the player is a complete idiot like many games do. You get the feeling that the game respects you.
The only instructions you get.One thing I didn’t like was the inclusion of puzzle elements. This game had a lot of potential had it not gone down the “avoid the enemies with predictable movement” course. I also think the game would be a lot better if it hadn’t done things like put a coin right above your starting position that you’re not supposed to get until later. Most people are going to grab the coin by instinct, at which point they have to restart. It’s not good game design.
It's a trap!Another problem is that the game is extremely linear. I found it to get boring at times, and it has practically no replay value. That kind of linearity seems to be common whenever games include puzzle elements (but not always – “Tetris” and “Dr. Mario” were very replayable puzzle games.) What I mean is, the game presents you with a scenario in which there is only one possible solution. You have to go through the sequence of motions the same exact way every time – there is no room for decision-making or expressing your personality. Most people – me included – find these types of games extremely dull.
At this point, allow me to issue a warning: my game would crash whenever I alt+tabbed to another window. Not sure what’s causing this – it could be the extensions that were used, or it could be some weird bug. It may be my computer. Anyway, let’s wrap up.
Although the game has obvious flaws, I enjoyed it enough to play through most of the game. Though I didn’t beat it (got too bored) I did like it a little bit, and I hope the creator’s next games don’t have puzzles in place of interesting gameplay.
This has been the fifth review in the Charmeleon's Awesum Reviews series!
