[h1]FoxMania: The Quest To Review All Fox Games On Steam![/h1]
[i]Conditions for inclusion:
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[*] -The player character must be consistently a fox; the fox must not be merely a skin or a character option
[*] -Must have 100% working Steam achievements
[*] -Must not be a visual novel
[/list][/i]
[b]Game #41: Ferdinand Fox tries Ecoterrorism[/b]
Hah, you thought I was stopping at 40 before the year's end? I got this last one in by the end of 2025, and boy, it's a weird one.
This, surprisingly, is a Game Boy Advance ROM running on the mGBA emulator. If you alt+enter out of fullscreen, you get to use some emulator features, like savestates, which is pretty cool. This will also be useful to know since there's no "quit game" button, and you just have to close the emulator when you're doine.
Ferdinand Fox has 7 days to save the world. Each day, he can choose a single activity, like watching TV, browsing the internet, cooking basil pesto, joining the great resistance, or spraying manure all over town hall. The activity, if successful, will raise his stats in specific ways. At the start of the next morning, he will read the newspaper and it will randomly change some stats, usually lowering them.
Get to the end of the week with high environmental health, high resistance strength, and low government approval ratings, and he saves the world. Get to the end of the game with bad stats, and the world burns. Run out of mental health before the end of the game, and you die of depression.
You're given a choice between 4-7 activities each day, out of a pool of about 20 possible activities. Some activities can only appear if you've beaten other activities, or if you have stats in specific ranges. Some activities only appear on day 7.
Each activity consists of 5 WarioWare-style microgames -- the same microgames in the same order, which is pretty disappointing. You are given 5 lives to beat all the microgames in the set, and you can't skip any. Unlike WarioWare, a lot of the microgames are exactly the same every time you play them. No difficulty levels, even. Some are even exact reskins of other microgames. For a game you're supposed to keep starting over and repeatedly playing, it's pretty monotonous.
[b]Things I liked:[/b]
[list]
[*] -The game is actually hilarious. I loved the sarcastic and irreverent sense of humor towards the subject material. The funniest moment, for me, was a minigame that just told me to drive. I dodged all the cars, and got a failure. Then I realized it wanted me to hit all the cars. I actually laughed out loud.
[*] -The graphic design and spritework is very charming.
[*] -Somehow, I have more respect for this game knowing it's a GBA rom, and access to the emulator settings was very welcome.
[/list]
[b]Things I didn't like:[/b]
[list]
[*] -The tutorial is actual garbage. According to the tutorial, here's how you win the game: "Reach the end of the week with at least at 4 [environmental health], and either at least at 2 [government approval] or the at most at 2 [resistance strength]!" Not only does it feel like I had a stroke reading that, but it's an outright lie as well, as it swapped the indicators for government approval and resistance strength on accident. That's pretty unhelpful.
[*] -In-game button prompts say "A" and "B", which are by default mapped to "X" and "Z" on the keyboard. Pretty confusing until you realize you're playing on an emulator.
[*] -Major points off for using an awful pixel font that makes a lot of capital letters look exactly the same.
[*] -For some reason, when the "Resistance strength" stat is at 0/5, it shows as 5/5.
[*] -The level select always begins by annoyingly shaking the whole screen as a train zooms by. I hate it.
[*] -Popping and cracking audio whenever the "you win" or "you lose" sound effect is played.
[*] -It's not always possible to win. The newspaper can randomly decide to take away 2-4 mental health points and kill you of depression whenever it wants. I'm not sure if this is hilariously on-point, bad game design, or both.
[*] -Gameplay is painfully repetitive. You'll be playing the same sets of microgames in the same order, over and over, with very little variance and no difficulty modifiers. I must have played the "join the resistance" level over 20 times, and jeeze, these games get old fast.
[*] -About half of the microgames are designed very obtusely, and don't make it immediately clear how you're supposed to win. For instance, there's one where it tells you to "look for news" on the internet, and you're supposed to infer that you need to click on a picture of a windmill, since this is an environmentalism game. There's another where you're supposed to "find vibes" on TV, and you're supposed to somehow know to change the channel to the Teletubbies. Whole lot of trial and error here. (Use the emulator savestates if you want!)
[*] -Microgames don't show a visible time limit, and some have unfairly strict time limits. You will lose if you hesitate for a moment.
[*] -GLITCHES. Some microgames actually crash the game if you press the wrong button at the wrong time. Some microgrames have bugged music and sound effects. Some levels, including the Arson and Monkeywrenching levels, actually just... don't seem to exist, and load the "make soup" level instead. At least two of the achievements are unobtainable for this reason.
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This was [i]almost[/i] a brilliant, quaint little joke game, but the technical issues really push it into "don't even bother" territory. Absolutely not worth $15, probably $5 at the very most. I'd be happy to come back and edit this review if, at the very least, the crash bugs and broken levels/achievements were fixed.
3 / 10.
