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Hrm. No TIE Fighter.

/leaves

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The grid’s quite annoying. Only a small annoyance BUT when it’s so integral to the game, it’s a bit of a deal breaker. It’s quite fiddly to get your pieces down in time I found and because Sofi is constantly skipping along, it almost made me feel that I was helping, rather than playing a game myself. If that makes any sense.

I found it quite frustrating and difficult. Sometimes I’d be merrily placing pieces, gathering stars and whot-not. Then I’d come across a few enemies at different levels, try to avoid them but fail. It’s not clear whether ANY contact harms you (ie. can you drop on them to kill?) either.

It’s an odd one really. As I said, I was looking forard to it and from the vids it looks interestingly different. I personally don’t think it quite comes together though. It’s certainly got no ‘wow’ factor or ‘ooh now THAT’S cool’ elements to it, which is surprising.

Shame.

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Hooray for new stuff!

If Lucasarts stated tomorrow that they were going to do five new adventure games, and further announced that not a single one was based off of Monkey Island, DoTT, Full Throttle, etc, — if you didn’t jump for joy shouting “Yay! New LucasArts adventure games!”, then you would be what is wrong with the gaming industry.

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It’s a shame as it has a nice atmosphere. The cynic in me just felt like some marketing person fused commercially successful games of yore and hoped to ride the wave of indie puzzlers that have been acclaimed recently. It says, “hai, i r this years Goo/Braid, maek meh moneyz” and it’s just.. not. It fails as a puzzle game and it fails as a platformer.

Also, the ‘piece’ control is very bad at times, especially when the screen scrolls suddenly (i.e. you drop quite a distance) or when you go anywhere near the edges of the screen with your cursor. The pieces have a sticky feeling, which is not something you want when the timing is so harsh.

I have no desire to even carry on through the rest of Act II, let alone go back through Act I in the hopes that random combinations of pieces might appear, random insects won’t randomly patrol at the wrong times and all the planets align, to enable me to collect other fireflies.

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I’ve got to the start of the third chapter; havne’t tried any of the bonus levels I’ve unlocked yet.

Pros:

The game is really pretty and stylish, the music fits it perfectly and the atmosphere in general is very good.with a bleakness that fits into the concept rather nicely.

Gameplay is pretty good and it’s damn satisfying to pull of a tricky sequence. Figuring out how to use your tools effectively and which ones to hold adds a nice wee bit of strategy to what could have become repetitive.

I’m not so irritated with the limited field of view as others – on most occassions you have the tools to extricate yourself from any sticky situations that come about after a leap of faith and figuring out the different routes round a levle saves replaying it from being tedious.

Cons;

The invisible grid. The amount of times I’ve died because an object has snapped to the wrong place is a source of a few frustrating moments (particularly if I’m in the middle of a good run where I’ve collected lots of fireflies). Whether accidentally trapping myself or being unable to save myself from an avoidable death this problem is the most glaring flaw in the game. Using the keyboard helps accuracy of placement but becomes useless after all but the earliest levels as you can’t move your items as quickly as is necessary to avoid death and do some of the trickier sections (as soon as the catapult is in use it’s game over for the keyboard as far as I’m concerned).

As one of the earlier posters mentioned the game would have benifited from a rewind button (it would have to be limited to a certain number of times per level to keep the game challenging but would alleviate the frustration caused by some of the more ‘unfair’ deaths)..

Replayability wise this will depend on how obsessive you are about collecting things. There’s certainly a lot to do in terms of firefly collection – i can see myself attempting to unlock most of the bonus levels – but getting them all would be an excercise in frustration and I reckon I’d get bored of it after a few hours.

Verdict: An very stylish, enjoyable game if a bit frustrating at times. Well worth picking up at the price. More of this sort of thing please Lucas Arts.

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