When I had finished 4 of the 5 routes, I thought I had experienced basically all of what the game had to offer and I was tempted to rate this game positively despite not actually wanting to recommend it. The dev left a note in the start menu, explaining that this was a one man effort, they didn't have the money to pay for professional translations, the fact that the story was equally as important as the gameplay etc. so I felt a little bad about giving a negative rating. It isn't a [i] terrible [/i] game after all. But that Cipher ending, sitting through all the unskippable text and endings in one sitting, and trying to get the last achievements did it for me.
[b] The Cipher ending. [/b]
[spoiler]You have to bomb (poop on) 5 guards twice (their health regens) with limited ammo that for some reason there isn't a counter for on this level, and then you have to ♥♥♥♥ in the president's kid's mouth. I'm not kidding but I wish I was. That's absolutely disgusting and completely unnecessary. Maybe this is funny to some people but it's rather immature. It left more than just a bad taste in my mouth.
In another route you're invited to a billionaire's penthouse pool where your brother is throwing a party for you. Apparently the other rich birds like it when they're pooped on. So then you need to poop on the guests in the pool but not too much because they'll get sick. And when you're done, a few birds like it so much they invite you to their own houses for you to do it to them in private. I don't know man, that kinda sounds like the dev has a scat kink or a very strange sense of humour. No kink shaming but I mean, this is a bit much and just not necessary? I don't think many people got to this point judging by the global achievements (0.8%) and that there is basically only one review that mentions this.[/spoiler]
[b] Pros: [/b]
[list]
[*]Pixel art is nice, colour scheme is different but not a bad thing.
[*]Simple, straight-forward controls.
[*]Music is decent although I guess it's actually pretty good if I spent hours listening to it while frustrated and don't hate it.
[*]Several characters with their own distinct personality and appearance.
[*]Three different characters to choose from with a total of 5 different endings.
[*]Humour. Bird-related puns etc.
[*]Some interesting plot points.
[*]Note from the dev in the start menu.
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[b] Cons: [/b]
[list]
[*]Slow and unskippable text. The text between levels is all dialogue so it's similar to a visual novel. I understand that the dev wants to relay the importance of the plot so they made the text unskippable but similar to a vn, there should be the option to skip already seen text. Especially if restarting a level means having to sit through the same text over and over. It's not a few sentences either, it's paragraphs between different characters. Not to mention the fact that the text doesn't all appear at once but rather, individual letters appear one at a time and there's no skipping that either. Most of my time spent playing this game was sitting through text, pressing the spacebar to try and hurry it up to get to the game play.
[*]Agonisingly slow ending text. Once you've completed one route, there's an epilogue. No problem with that except the text doesn't appear all at once. It s l o w l y drifts up your screen at the rate of 5 seconds per line with about 5 words per line. There are paragraphs of text. Of course, no skipping that either. I don't understand, it's like the dev just wants players to stay in game for as long as possible. There's no reward for staying until the end; you get achievements as soon as the text starts to appear and then you can just exit to the start menu so you don't need to know the ending to the story. There's no explanation for the text being as slow as it is.
[*]The font. It was okay at first because it was a nice change, but reading a crap ton of text with that font makes my eyes bleed. The letter 'i' looks like an 'l' (doesn't appear that way in the screenshots for some reason), the letter 'c' looks like an 'o' etc. 'Billion' looks like 'bllllon' and 'facts' looks like 'faots'. I understand the font choice because it matches but the pixel graphics but it's not great for clarity, especially with the not-so-great English.
[*]Countless spelling and grammatical issues. Nothing more to add. Every time I saw an error I just wished I could correct it. I still want to correct them all. You do get the general idea of what is being said though. These days it isn't that difficult to get someone to edit text. No need to pay for a professional translator, the dev could pay someone $40 to simply edit their translations through Upwork or something but I don’t know where they’re located so I can’t say if there are restrictions on certain things.
[*]Difficulty. Very little room for error. It's one thing to need to hit stationary targets like cars while the wind is affecting the trajectory of your "bomb" but when the targets move at different speeds and in different directions while you are also constantly moving, with no/ little room for error? It gets quite frustrating. And that's on easy difficulty. Really no reason for a hard difficulty although another reviewer said there wasn’t much of a difference anyway. One of the most difficult levels is level 11, just before the main story diverges into three, depending on which character you side with. It's not even halfway through the game.
[*]Weird locking and unlocking of levels. Naturally puzzle games, levels are locked until you reach them. Except once you finish a route from one of the three characters, all the other levels unlock. Meaning, you can jump straight to the end and choose the last level for the other characters and get the achievements. Doesn't make sense. If the story was so important, we'd have to unlock each level as we reached it so we’d have to read the story.
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Speaking of story, I don’t really know what to say about it. Basically humans aren't feeding pigeons anymore so birds are starving and have decided to poop on people and cars etc. to get people's attention. Different routes end with differing outcomes of course so there isn't much I can say without spoiling. There are some religious aspects which I wasn't really fond of. Main argument being religion is good and helps people (birds), especially the poor ones, while the rich are greedy, have black souls and deserve death etc. The good ending is siding with religion and the bad is going against it. It really isn’t being subtle.
[b] Would I recommend? [/b] No, not at this stage at least unless the cons actually sound appealing to you or you’re just interested. I feel like most of the positive reviews are from people who didn't get very far in the game and just review every game they play or they got it for free and feel obliged to recommend it. Again, it's not [i] terrible [/i] but it’s not great and I wouldn't do this again. There's quite a bit of work that can be done. The dev should read reviews and spend time making fixes/ improvements rather than creating a hentai puzzle game. Quality over quantity but I guess whatever will make profits. The last update was in August, 2017 that mentioned mobile releases and easier difficulty but that has yet to be seen and it's nearly been a year.
