Crouching Pony Hidden Dragon

Tags: Sidescroll Shooter Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library TLDR: Underpar experience. Perfectly servicable. Some questionable design decisions and mechanical flaws. Did not receive proper love and care for a Steam Port for resolutions. Xbox pad works great. 2 player co-op available. Review: Xbox360 pad detected and working correctly. No resolution option. Grainy. Sound design was slighty irritating rather low quality wannabe japanese track. Sound effects were also a little underwhelming in quality but at least not irritating. Color palette was ugly, and no retro excuses please. I categorized with sidescroll shooters because the whole gimmick here is to shoot ninja stars, one button for blue stars one for red, kill red foes with red stars and blue foes with blue stars. You can also use RT to do a small jump and if you get in melee range your star shooting button becomes a kick which is mostly effective against everything. Kicking everything is not really an option, your health gets grinded down fairly fast, and even if you destroy every single crate and kill every single foe you will not drop a health pack ever. Just useless power ups and coinage. The coinage requires way too much grinding to buy anything from the occasional store. The whole store idea that you have to hunt down in the level was actually a design flaw. Mostly because of the other design flaw, the timer. I reckon this is the devs taking inspiration from cabinet arcade games but in this game it serves no purpose, it rushes you, stresses you out while you learn the map layout makes backtracking to stores an ill advised proposition. It really is useless. Especially since foes respawn anyway which is rather irritating given that you cannot grind them. The combat was on the okay side, no blocking however, and the arrows were not twin stick, so you have to start running in a direction before you can start shooting stars in that angle which often means you have to first try to make distance with a foe before trying to aim at them, which wastes time, which is limited, and also frustrates the player. A frustrated player will stop bothering being careful and will just aim and shoot getting hit and his health grinded in the process. I thought that the jutsu animation was pretty sweet, and the idea of having the screen lock into some dramatic arena moment when 7 or more foes enter the screen was an interesting touch. The color coded stars and enemies I felt were more of an artificial handicap and not very enjoyable. I could have lived with the humor and tone they were going for but I thought it was a little bit uninspired. You can have sultry and voluptuous characters and guys in pyjama, and cringeworthy senseis but you need to take ownership of it, and not make everything paper thin and almost a parody of itself. Take your joke seriously enough to have it have some punch otherwise dont bother. All in all this feels like it had genuine effort put into it and is not strictly speaking shovelware but it also feels firmly underpar and unpleasant all around. Overall Score: 3.5/10 (between poor and fair)

The controls are awfull, can't play this game at all. It's impossible to avoid getting hit and rains projectiles towards the character

Doesnt even work with any gamepad and tech support cant fix it. Only supports keyboard. S***.

3/10

VERY, VERY COOL!!- IF YOU HAVE A GAMEPAD, THEN TAKE IT IMMEDIATELY.-EVERYTHING IS DONE AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL (THE GAME WAS CLEARLY DONE WITH A SOUL)

Geil! Aber schwer.

Slow, clunky and I don't like it :/

It looks and plays like an arcade game. Color-coded combat is reminiscent of those wacky arcade machines where you must mash the correct color button to score points; it's generally the same here. Unfortunately, that sort of playstyle isn't that suitable for the longevity of my keyboard. Peojectiles are slow, controls are clunky, loot drops take forever to appear, enemies are bullet-sponges and you die way too easily. Not fun.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Aggiornamento: Per far riconoscere il joypad bisogna staccare tutte le altre periferiche di gioco, altri joypad, keypad tipo il razer nostromo e cose così Anche con il joypad il gioco non arriva alla sufficienza, infatti l'agilità dei personaggi sale da elefante a ippopotamo e in compenso la maggioranza delle volte che ci si gira velocemente non si finisce mai esattamente nella direzione desiderata. Aggiungerei anche che il salto (schivata?) è solo marginamente utile visto che i nemici ti colpiscono prima della loro animazione e i proiettili colpiscono anche durante la schivata. Recenzione originale: Se non fosse che i due ninja hanno l'agilità di un camion. Se non fosse che il calocolo delle collisioni è pessimo. se non fosse che non c'è verso di fargli riconoscere il joypad. Se non fosse che i nemici sparano e colpiscono in tutte le direzioni e tu solo nelle 8 delle frecce direzionali. Se non fosse che i nemici si sovrappongono e adio velleita di usare il colore giusto. Se non fosse che la meccanica del corpo a corpo è inutile e non lascia capire chi si sta colpendo. Se non fose che ci sono un centinaio di difetti del genere sarebbe un bel gioco con grafica divertente e ispirata e una meccanica basata sui colori azzeccata.