[h1]“Deep Below” a mediocre game made worse with bugs.[/h1]
[b]Pros[/b]
+Free
[b]Cons[/b]
-Buggy
-Unoriginal concept
-Unintuitive UI
-No video options
Fps issues may be fixed but a thousand more issues remain. Deep Below is a platformer adventure game that appears to be set in some lava filled ancient ruin; A very cliche setting for an adventure game but that’s the least of its issues. From the moment the game is launched I am placed in a room with a flickering candle that looks like it was drawn in paint and a book that says “Start Game” on it. One may think that clicking on the book would be what launches the game but you, however, would be strongly mistaken as you must (without any instructions) realize that you have to instead press ‘E’ to open the book. Once oneself stumbles their way into opening the book they are greeted with the main menu consisting of “Play Game”, “Options”, and “Exit Game”. Still using the keyboard to navigate you can finally play this game.
The world fades from black and one will find their self in a cavern with multiple pictures on the walls detailing basic controls. However crudely done this does serve as a good way to demonstrate the controls to the player. The game claims to support VR on one of the said pictures I, however, can not test this as they only support the Oculus Dev kit 2 and only own a Vive. More notably the game assumes the player will know that ‘WASD’ and spacebar are used to walk and jump around as there are no pictures telling me how to move, not a major deal for a veteran gamer but what could be disastrous to a beginner. After a short walk, the player runs into another picture, this time, informing the player that they are able to sprint which brings up my next issue I had with this game. There's absolutely no indication of when your ability to sprint will run out, no traditional meter on a hud or even heavy breathing as the character tires from spriting. You will just simply stop with no warning and this lead to multiple deaths when some jumps require the player to sprint to even make the jump. On a positive note, the rope swinging was at least mostly enjoyable the controls were lackluster as there is no real way to control your swing but it worked. In not too long the player comes across scattered books and knocked over bookcases with a glove of some sort in the middle. It is intuitive enough to pick it up and then to open the door. This part of the game was fairly well done.
In not too long I acquired an upgrade to my glove that allowed me to shoot glowing crystals which add an interesting mechanic to the game of lighting up dark areas to make it possible to explore. There were, however, moments that despite the lights indicating ammo being full I was unable to shoot the crystals out. This made exploring both frustrating and incredibly time-consuming as I jumped around and spammed my mouse trying to shoot. Now despite all of this, I found myself starting to enjoy the game running through caves and shooting crystals to light the way that was until I ran into the godforsaken bugs of the autosave.
Now as of writing this review I have tried to play this game twice, both times ending after encountering a bug with the autosave feature. The game seems to enjoy putting the checkpoints, in lava or off the edge of a platform. Both cases end with the player dying over and over with no possible way to recover. https://youtu.be/yK4I6ZN0pC8 This video demonstrates the autosave function failing and then when pressing ‘L’ to load the last save it fails again by putting me back at an earlier save that was bugged out ending my first attempt at a playthrough. This game may be a wonderful game but being riddled with bugs like this make it impossible to enjoy or play. It is to be said that the best part of this game is the exit button.
