Ladybird Reflect

overall alright.

Best 10 minutes of my life <3

This game feels very unpolished. It has a few okay ideas, but many flaws. It's a sideways breakout clone in which your goal is to hit the thing on the other side. There's different sticks you can choose as your paddle which change the way the ladybug bounces off of it. There's power-ups in this game as well as power-downs. I lke the idea of having different paddles which bounce the ladybug differently, though the sticks except the first one appeared to me as unreliable. I have to come back on that one, because I haven't played with the other sticks for long enough to know for sure. The power-ups and -downs are hit or miss. I really like the cricket one, as it makes your ball affected to gravity so it bounces in an arc. It may not be useful every time, but it's unique and fun to see. There's an upgrade to make your paddle larger too, a staple in breakout clones. I dislike that it only gives you a larger default stick, even if you picked a different one, but it's better than nothing. Annoyingly, the paddle shrinks without a warning. An indicator, such as a flashing paddle, would have been great. Another upgrade gives you a second ball, another staple in breakout clones. Two of the downgrades just fill your screen with flies or spiders. The frog seemingly does nothing, as far as I can tell. The cobweb block just kills you. They appear in the later levels, and they're often placed in a way that you can't avoid them. The worst offenders are the levels 19 and above. You will have to stack lives for these ones or get lucky with the double balls. The levels before are serviceable, but that's about it... There's other game modes as well. In Survival Mode, ladybugs fall from above and you have to catch them with a basket. Everything about it is too slow. I think there have been instances where the game decides that you lose because you're too slow to catch both ladybugs, regardless of how you play it. AI Mode and Two Players are just Pong, one against a CPU player and the other against a friend locally. The level editor is kind of pointless and painful to use, as you can't save/load your level and if you want to place the same block again, you have to re-select it. The controls are okay, except for a major problem - You control the game with the mouse, and it's not locked inside the screen. When you're outside of the screen, the game doesn't register your mouse movement. This leads to some very stupid deaths and a lot of frustration to negate any enjoyment you could have had with this otherwise average to mediocre game. You can set the game to full screen (trust me, it's mandatory), but even then I've moved out of the screen onto my second monitor a lot. When you're in a level, the mouse needs to be locked inside, this is inexcusable. There have been other instances where the game decided to not register my mouse movement while staying in the screen, but I can't tell where this came from. You can kind of control the ball, but not reliably. Furthermore, the ball sometimes decides to bounce in a weird way. Also, the paddle can move outside the play area. I've only noticed it when I started a two player game and held in one direction out of boredom, when suddenly, they went off-screen. It's weird. The graphics are as basic as they can get. They don't need to be fancy anyway. The sound is meh. The music, which you can luckily mute, gets annoying after a while. This game could have been average, but the mouse leaving the window is too much of a problem to recommend this game.

good

Is this game un-American? They call it a ladyBIRD and not a ladyBUG, so you tell me! FACT: Non-Americans don't know the difference between birds and bugs! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!!