Cosmic Leap

Análise.

⠀

I am writing this review after "only" 50 minutes of playtime. "Only", because this is a very fast game, where levels should be finished in under 10 seconds sometimes. So 50 minutes is a looong time for playing this game and feels like 5 hours or so. Whether you are looking for a few minutes of distraction or want to try a speedrun after mastering all levels forth and back, this game is well worth its small price. Pro: - Each level is more or less easy to win, but hard to nearly impossible to master - I like the school grade measuring system for level success. Makes you want to try it "only one more time" ;-) - the retro-modern, cathode-ray tube, 8-Bit, pseudo-3D graphics - Support! The game creator/programmer was able to help me with a specific technical issue within hours. Double plus LIKE! Neutral: - the storyline. Not every game must have one. This one fits into the overall game look and feel, but I would not have missed it if it did not have one. Cons: - when playing for a while, the music may get a bit monotonous. This is my personal experience, which may not be applicable to other players. [removed]Cons: - possible issues with screen resolution in full screen mode. Unity does not remember the set screen resolution. This is a Unity platform specific flaw on some systems (like mine, unfortunately) for which the programmer cannot be blamed for. Windowed mode works fine, so this is no real issue. [Edit Mar 24th: solved. The game creator reactivated the Unity config screen which allows to set fullscreen in the correct resolution. Again: double plus LIKE!]

Cosmic Leap is a great little adventure game whose voxel art approach to graphics and arcade-type sounds give it a retro feeling. Essentially, we move (jump) from one planet to another only to reach our spaceship. Along the way we can collect coins and if you are quick enough you can also jump into another rocket ship! You can collect characters beside the different spaceships. It's all about timing your jumps carefully; it's one of those games that requires some patience on your end but it's well worth the trouble. I checked the developer's website and video games are not his major profile but are rather considered "sideline projects". Have fun and blast away!

[h1] Jump from one planet to another. Better alternatives: Robonauts or Orbital Gear. [/h1]

The controls suck. It's a crapshoot whether you'll stop, move clockwise, or move counterclockwise. And this is one of those games that requires precise timing of controls. So that's kind of a big deal. The tougher levels just give you more obstacles and less time to react to them, and a single mistake means restarting the level. So it feels less like skillful maneuvering and more like memorizing which buttons to press at which time. More frustrating than fun, IMO. It's also really short, but that's understandable at this price point.

Cosmic Leap is a rather shallow game that feels more like a demo than a serious entry in the PC gaming marketplace. It's basically one of those action/timing games where you jump between circles, although this one has been rendered (badly) with minimalist low poly "voxel" style presentation... just lipstick on the pig for that, but at least enough effort went in to make it clear this isn't just an asset flip, so that's something. Anyway you run around these "spheres" (might as well be circles because you only run around a fixed longitude) and jump to the next circle, avoiding any obstacles by reversing the direction of your running (so it's a 3 button game.. sigh). That's all there is to it, I've seen this in a dozen or more mobile apps, making it unclear why this is on Steam at all. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes Cosmic Leap might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Cosmic Leap has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for starting the game, but less than 7 percent of players bothered to get that far. Less than 1 in ten gamers even bothered to launch this even though they own the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 7 percent of players bothered launching the game. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the game? Trading cards. Players will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. Cosmic Leap is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam.