How do you get such a good idea so wrong?
posted by BBAlpert (HERNDON, VA) Mar 13, 2012
Member since Mar 2012
I would never have thought a game built on the premise of "what if you got to stick bombs to stuff and watch it fall over?" could be bad, especially not this bad. A few fundamental problems:
-Awful controls that cannot (as far as I could tell) be remapped. The controls are laid out in such a way that you'd need 3 hands to use comfortably. Standard FPS keys (specifically tab, space, and 1-4) on the left side of the board are used for some things, but character movement is controlled with the arrow keys. On top of that, the camera aim is controlled by the mouse, so you can't control everything at once (which is inexcusable considering there aren't even all that many controls in the game).
-A terrible interface. My understanding of UI design is that you have to strike a balance between providing the user with adequate information without cluttering the screen with too many details. This game somehow fails at both, as your screen is constantly filled with junk that doesn't tell you a doggone thing.
-Visual problems. This isn't about the graphics being shoddy, this is more an issue of not being able to see what you need to. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you'd try this game to watch old factories and bridges blow up and fall over. In the 4 missions I played, I didn't see a single thing explode or fall over. I demolished stuff, certainly, but I couldn't see it happening, really. When the explosives go off, your character's vision blurs and flips upside down for half a second or so, and then there's a big brown cloud of dirt and dust. When it clears, your building is mostly gone. I'm assuming there was some sort of physics simulation stuff going on inside all that smoke, but I really can't say for certain.
The bottom line is that this is a game that could have, SHOULD have been at minimum an amusing distraction, and yet the ball was dropped in every conceivable regard.
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