I played with the keyboard and found the jump responsiveness to be fine, and the game has never crashed on me, but it’s not without problems. A tutorial level set in the Orphanage is a good idea. Those flying heart enemies are tremendously annoying since they behave like the asteroids in, well, Asteroids, and split into smaller versions of themselves when shot. The flying cannons are a case of hugely uninspired enemy design, and shooting them is no fun since they can see you before you can see them. The health system as a whole needs tweaking, not necessarily to make the game easier but to make it clearer and easier to understand what will heal you and by how much. And there’s nothing fun about levels that send you off on tiresome item hunts through huge, samey enviroments – that sinking feeling when you reach the end of level marker and realise that you’ve missed a crystal and you have absolutely no idea where it might be is a special kind of horrible.

But then something huge comes crashing through the trees towards you, a massive creature two screens tall that is so impervious to your attacks that you might as well not be there at all, and personally I can’t help but think that if the creators had playtested a little better and been more open to criticism then this would have been something truly special. It’s a missed opportunity more than anything else, and knowing that makes me die a little inside.

However, I still expect to be treated with some respect, even when I err. I don’t appreciate how you painted me with malign intent in your response, saying I was being dishonest and unthinking. In fact, the closest I came to making an attack was that I said I was “disappointed” with you.

In closing, I’m sorry for the trouble, but I don’t think there was any precedent to justify me being treated like a common troll.

Also, I think my post was extremely sympathetic to the situation, and in no way set out to invite bashing. Let alone that this thread hasn’t featured any particular bias anyway, people evenly criticising Bernard and Destructoid, and no one being cruel to anyone but Uwe Boll.

Do please think before attacking. Thanks.

Eternity’s Child is not a 1/10 game at all. It’s a potentially quite good game where the designer tragically overlooked the needs of new players and needed a lot more tweaking before it’s release.

The designer overlooked the needs of all players, not just new ones. Of course every bad game ever is a “potentially good game”, it’s just a matter of what it would take to get there. Eternity’s Child needs a designer who isn’t so blind to the flaws of his own creation, and considering the way Bernard has rushed to the game’s defense that seems unlikely to become a reality.

It’s obvious that in a Fair and Righteous World a 1/10 would mean a game with no merit at all, which isn’t what the Destructoid review described, ofcourse.

On the other hand, in the same Fair and Righteous World a 7/10 would be a relatively high score, seeing as most good games would score a 6/10, which in the real (well, internet..) world more or less is saying a game is shit – “no, no, no!” the review sites sputter, “that means it’s an okay game!”.. no, that’s what you say on your ‘review scores policy’ page, that’s not what people actually see (nor what is demonstrated).

It sounds pretty fair to me. It’s certainly a darn sight more mercy for a game than I’d give it by the sounds of things. Given the vast wealth of games I could redeem my few squid at, more so the amount of quality material I can get from the intertits for the time it takes to download and nothing else, then these things *are* important.

And as a person who writes games, these are things I’d want to hear about a game I’d had some involvement in. Ok, not want to hear because no-one likes hearing bad things about their baby, but I’d *need* to hear.

Or are we supposed to accept that Driv3r style show stopping bugs are acceptable if there’s some hope on the horizon?

Also no extra charge for the next chapters in the game when you are done. I’m not telling anyone to rush out and grab it but try the demo and see if you can see anything interesting for you. I can only see this one grow.

That being said, should gaming sites publish updated reviews if otherwise maligned games receive substantial updates/modifications? SimCity Societies is supposedly much better now that they’ve patched it several times, but few sites reported on this update (Walker or Kieron mentioned it in a post somewhere).

1) The first level is just too f***ing hard for players who haven’t played before. There’s no tutorial level, and the first level is filled with nothing but platforms over fall-to-a-certain-death.

How this should have been fixed: The Orphanage is mentioned in the intro. It should have been made into a tutorial level instead of dumping the player in what would have been the first level of world 2 in a Mario game.

2) There are plenty of annoying things that can and should have been tweaked to be much less annoying. For example, the cannons that spam slow-moving bullets at you. The bullets are nearly impossible to dodge, but you can shoot the bullets with your own faster-moving bullets. The cannon keeps shooting at you until you kill it (with your bullets), so getting past each cannon is an exercise in sitting still and click-click-clicking until you shoot past the bullet-spam and can damage the cannon.

How this should have been fixed: less bullets, give the cannons more hit points, and have the cannons be “stunned” for a split second when they’re hit. Even if the net result is the same amount of clicking, it would feel like you’re fighting back instead of forcing the player to sit and spam bullets back at the enemy.

3) Like Wild 9, the main characters just doesn’t have a reasonable amount of hit points. Mario doesn’t need a lot of hit points because he’s really agile and the controls are really tight. Sonic doesn’t need a lot of hit points because rings are all over the place. Players probably won’t need a lot of hit points when they’re as good as the designer at playing the game, but they don’t start off that way.

How this should have been fixed: If the designers don’t want to increase hit points, there needs to be a lot more health potions, health potion dispensers and other ways to recover said hit points. Also, reducing the initial lethality of the enemies.

Eternity’s Child is not a 1/10 game at all. It’s a potentially quite good game where the designer tragically overlooked the needs of new players and needed a lot more tweaking before it’s release.