Ayo the Clown
I backed this game on Kickstarter and I think it is so much better than anticipated!
It is such a colourful and fun platfurmer game. The art in this game is amazing, with such attention to small details. The 2.5D is used creatively with monsters and boss levels. At the beginning I thought it would be a bit easy but the levels become more difficult and intriguing as you go along, as well as adding side missions and charming little surprises. I love playing it and even my husband was impressed by it. Highly recommend for enjoyable and lovely time.
– Real player with 68.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best 2.5D Funny Games.
Kickstarter backer here. Just started playing the game with my xbox controller and I love it. What a wonderful 2.5D platformer! I dig the color scheme so much, it’s so fun and whimsical and vibrant. There’s a balloon ability that you can basically use whenever you land, so you don’t have to collect any items to activate, which allows you to float–it’s a lot of fun! There’s plenty of secrets with hidden treasure and stuff to climb (so usually there’s a path above you you may want to explore as well).
– Real player with 17.6 hrs in game
Guard Duty
Did not enjoy the gameplay even for a moment. Pains me to say it, because the graphics and animation were superb. The story was forgettable (I spent the first hour looking for my pants), and the voice acting was just okay (though plentiful).
Besides the fact that I was never invested in the story or the characters, this point and click adventure used a bunch of gameplay conventions that drove me crazy. Sometimes, there will be a scene where the landscape extends past the monitor, which is only visible by first walking to the boarder. Then, there would be scenes where items were inaccessible until something else happened, but there were no indicators that there were a new object hotspot. And lastly, the interaction of objects was not consistent, even the same object might be inaccessible at one time then be able to be pushed a few moments later.
– Real player with 9.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best 2.5D Pixel Graphics Games.
The adventure game genre seems a little oversaturated with somber detective stories. As much as I enjoy those, I love nothing more than some good laughs, some vibrant colors - and I’m a sucker for cartoons! Guard Duty fills that void on all counts.
It harkens back to gems of lo-res point&click comedy such as Simon the Sorcerer or Discworld. It’s got that lively, colorful, cartoony art and animation that’s just joy to these tired eyes. It’s crisp & elegant, with a well-chosen palette. Story-wise it might also remind you of the classic Discworld - as you assume the role of a member of the town guard. There’s magic, orcs and monsters, too! And time travel! If you enjoyed Sir Terry’s imaginative worlds (both the fantastic and the earlier sci-fi) & his sharp wit, you’ll be right at home - like in the novels, the main goal is simple: “Save the princess. Save the world”, but what elevates it is the characters, the interactions, and the humor. There’s some genuinely endearing slapstick, a few nods to the genre classics (concentrated in one spot mostly), but my favorite was the multi-layered bits, saturated with meta relating to modern culture, and even gaming. On the flipside - the game gets significantly darker when the main antagonist surfaces. Tondbert only gets glimpses of this dark side - but then, in the last act, we are transported into a bleak neon-lit future. Think Blade Runner or Terminator. It still manages to throw in a few jokes, and there’s your token geeky hacker girl to lighten up the mood - but other than that, it’s pretty straightforward sci-fi/cyberpunk. This bit feels shorter - with not much world to explore - but it makes sense. For one, given the situation, the world of the future wouldn’t be very lively & interesting to just roam around. Two: there’s been enough build-up, time for some decissive action!
– Real player with 9.2 hrs in game
AR-K
I received this game as a part of some bundle I bought way back.
I want to like this game. I wish the development team the best. But unfortunately I cannot recommend it, not even for $8 USD.
There are good, or at least decent, things here. There is some humor, including physical humor, that works. The actual voice lines are mostly fine, and what faults there are there in this audio itself are much more likely on the VA director and/or scriptwriters. Barring one jarring segment of lines I noticed in the 2nd episode where something obviously went wrong in recording or compression or something, but the team decided to use it anyway, which… fits with some of my suspicions about how out-of-time/energy/money they were feeling at the time.
– Real player with 16.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best 2.5D Dark Humor Games.
AR-K may be a study in how to have an okay story, okay graphics and good voice-acting and still come out with a bad game - soo manyy problems.
This title consists of the first two episodes of the game, “Gone with the Sphere” and “The Girl Who Wasn’t There”, and the second feels way better than the first. Still, we see a lot of beginner’s mistakes in the handiwork. Basically every aspect of the game is flawed in some way or another.
Note: Review was rewritten to fit Steam’s transparent character limit.
– Real player with 15.9 hrs in game
Shantae: Half-Genie Hero
Shantae: Half Genie Hero is the latest installment of the Shantae series, after being successfully Kickstarted back in 2013 and easily surpassing its $400,000 goal. I believe they used this money well to improve the game both visually and audibly. I have not ever played Pirates Curse, and so this will not be a comparison between the two.
Positives:
Fantastic Visuals
Half Genie Hero got a serious visual update compared to other Shantae games, and it really pays off. With smooth 60 FPS animation, the game is stunning to behold and has detailed backgrounds often with many things going on in them as well (If you wait long enough in Mermaid Falls Factory, Bolo passes by on a hook with a fish attached to his head). This visual improvement ensures that people who are deterred from older pixelated graphics won’t miss out on the classic Shantae character and platforming appeal.
– Real player with 35.9 hrs in game
A great addition to the Shantae line of games that have become big favorites of mine. To start off, 2D animation amongst 3D shaded backgrounds looks sharp! I was a little surprised at first, because I had played Shantae so much in it’s pixel art form, but this new style WayForward has adopted for the series is fantastic and I got used to it fairly quickly. That also including the control scheme which is very snappy and responsive! Shantae has become a living realtime cartoon and it is a major factor that I’m so glad the series now has.
– Real player with 32.3 hrs in game