Map Map - A Game About Maps

I would seriously pay AAA price for this game at 4-5x size. The mechanics and tools are amazing, I only wish that you could erase pencil and pen separately and maybe have some color options. I love how you can jump into a map and solve it in minutes, or "waste" hours drawing in every detail of the map just for the fun of it. I've played this game for 9 hours, and 8 of that was just adding every little detail to a the maps. If Map Map released an expansion or made a Map map 2 I am pretty sure we would achieve world piece. Masterpiece. Please take more of my money!

[h2]A "game about maps" that quickly turns into cheap platforming[/h2] [b]Pretty typical case of good idea, botched execution. Unfocused and uninspired level design cobbled together using 2 dozen or so assets.[/b] The core gameplay loop is landing a small island, and using landmarks and the shoreline as reference points, you mark the desired spot GeoGuessr-style. Finish marking them, and hop onto the next level/island. You don't actually chart a map or fill it in (you have the tools, but have zero incentive to do so), you just mark 1-3 spots then move on. On most maps I drew only like 2-3 lines. What is worse, you can bruteforce most of the game, if you fail a mark, you can just try again without the slightest punishment, and it even shows the direction of the real target. This makes the game much more frustrating than satisfying. There are 2 more things to do besides that, one is treasure hunting, which in practice means finding a small 'X marks the spot' graffiti map on a wall or stone in a hidden location, but even that gets boring real fast bc of the lack of creativity on this front doesn't keep it fresh and exciting, sometimes it is even annoying if the island is big and you have to comb through it for the clue. The other thing to do is platforming challenges where the "floor is lava". Why does this exist in a mapping game I have no idea. Stretching the game time I guess? It just makes the game feel unfocused. As you progress, you unlock more tools, but the majority of them are of not much use, and some of them are weirdly designed. For example the camera does a better job at zooming in than the telescope. (Why is the camera a midgame unlock when screenshotting exist in this day and age?) The aforementioned treasure hunts give you stickers that are entirely useless from a practical point of view. Which makes these hunts a letdown, bc you know you will get useless stuff as a reward. The platform-building feels janky and an afterthought (the poles of the platforms do not reach to the ground if you build them high enough. It is just a visual problem, but shows the lack of care and polish). Useful tools like the telescope and compass only come in when you are like 90% through the game, you can use the sextant for ONE level, as it is the last upgrade. And the game, for most of its playtime doesn't give you accurate enough tools for the precision it demands. That is, if you want to nail the mark first try and not resorting to trial-and-error. Who thought a SWAMP where you die if you touch water thats not ankle deep, would be an interesting place to navigate through like 7 levels? The game has 3 biomes, 2 of them are not much different, so the islands are visually not distinct or interesting enough. [h3]Overall, the game just fell flat... for me it was massive disappointment, as I was looking forward to this game.[/h3] Can't wait for Locator to come out. That actually nailed what this game should have been.

Wonderful little game that I thorougly enjoyed. If you want to fully enjoy this game, you need to take a deep breath and relax. Trying to "grind" this game is tedious, as you need to explore the islands thoroughly to find all optional treasures. If you can rid yourself of that impatient completionist urge and engage with the game as a cozy, relaxing activity that just lets you wonder, then you are in for a treat, and every discovered clue and treasure will reward you greatly for figuring it out. The game does not punish repeated guesses, so the temptation is strong to brute-force the 0.0 step rating. I naturally played it safe, taking multiple measurements and double-checking before making my first guess, which makes an initial perfect guess all the more satisfying. There is nothing stopping you from forcing a perfect guess by repeated trial and error, but that quickly hollows out the experience and sucks the fun out of the game. "Map Map" is a great game if you play it the way it was intended, which is calm, relaxed and with a natural curiosity. I see how some people could find it frustrating, but I feel that stems more from being conditioned to play games like a completionist. That being said, I completed it to 100% with all achievements, and during it I had to remind myself a few times to take it easy as well.

Map Map is a very cute game, with a core premise I don't think I've seen before elsewhere, and it's done well. I just wish it had avoided a couple of issues that made the game feel like more of a chore and less like the childlike whimsical adventure that its ham-fisted writing tries to frame itself as. My first, most egregious complaint is that the last tool you unlock in the game, the sextant, allows you to tell the distance of an object, as well as the change in altitude between your position and where you're looking. Quibbles about specific implementation aside, this is absolutely fantastic, really opening up a lot of the landmark-based triangulation the game seems to want to push you towards. It gives the surveyor fantasy, planting flags, moving from point to distant point, crossing and criss-crossing lines and stickers all over your map with confidence and accuracy. This is the [i]last[/i] tool you get in the game. Until then, the game just pretends that verticality is...well, I cannot imagine what they were thinking. If I wanted to get accurate measurements, I would literally have to open up a notepad and do some trig. It is insane to me that they give you this tool [i]after[/i] you enter the mountains biome, where you are literally running up and down mountains, or flying around over them, while still suck measuring horizontally. Say there's a VERY simple goal of telling the distance between two points and there's a mountain in the way. You can not count steps, because that tool simply doesn't work with any elevation involved. So what's left? Measure to the base of one side, the base of the other, and approximate the width? Stand at the apex and determine the distance to each side and draw yourself a pair of right triangles and grab a calculator? Invent some bizarre ritual of navigating 50 steps north, 7 east, 6 south, 3 east, 20 south...until you can link your destinations with the world's ugliest polyhedron? And let's hope you walked [i]exactly[/i] north/south/east/west. And you didn't move your camera, ever. And your steps were the right exact length. And so on... It's just kind of awful and inexact, and makes you feel like your tools are not up to the tasks you are given. This happens pretty much every time you're close to being handed a new tool, and while it makes the upgrade feel powerful and cool...I don't think it's well designed. Not in a game where being exact is the whole point. The game's other major fault lies in the implementation of showing how good or bad your guess is: It shows you your guess, and the target location, and how far off you were. Not an issue, right? Except there's a button right there that lets you guess again, which you're going to do if you're wrong, and then instead of doing all the fun map work and triangulating and cross-checking landmarks and coordinates...you're just guessing and checking. Move that lil' pin about 7 steps about south-west. This is so much tragically faster and easier than playing the game the intended, fun way. And to make it all the more toxic, there's an achievement for some reason to get literally every objective in the game at a distance of 0.0, meaning if you're a sucker like me, even if you get it "right", you're still going to go back and forth another half-dozen times to get it [i]exactly[/i] right. These two issues compound. You have very inelegant tools, and a very overpowered way to bypass them. It makes the only reasonable way to play to just throw out guesses, and the only fun way to play, to deliberately restrict yourself. I would have much preferred more relaxed targets, that only gave you the 1/2/3 stars they assign you as a guide to how well you did. This is a case where perfect information lets the player optimize the fun out of the game. So here's my review: Play this lighthearted, creative, extremely novel game. Absolutely do not try to get all the achievements. Do the actual map work that you paid for, and when your guess is off? Stick it anyway. Own that ♥♥♥♥. Perfection is overrated. The hidden things around the map are exciting to find and rewarding to figure out. The challenge is demanding, compelling, and lets you tackle it from a variety of angles. The game is novel, rewarding, and great fun. If I'd followed that advice, (or, y'know, if the devs had encouraged that style of play), I think Map Map would have landed for me as one of the most interesting challenges I've played through, and less like a chore. But if you're like me, and you're interested in new experiences and novel gameplay above all else, then absolutely buy and play this game.

Map Map is a game I have had on my wishlist for about as long as it has been available for wishlisting, and a game I had really looked forward to. A game about mapping out stuff, stepping out distances, inspecting landmarks, circling the compass on map, I had really big expectations for this game, it seemed to feature a game mechanic that I had never seen before in my long gaming career. First few maps started of great, you got a landmark, stepped out distances, great fun was had. And then the game took quite a turn, instead of focusing on the mapping aspect and building upon that, it turned into more of a 3D platformer-exploration game, where you spend more time rummaging around the islands looking for hints on where to find hidden treasure, than actually mapping the island itself. For gods sake, around map 10, the game actively removes 80% of the drawn map, and you have no references in the world to work out from, it feels like you have to brute-force solutions rather than trying to work out the solution. It feels like the developers had a good really idea and but couldn't find a way to make the mapping mechanic more challenging, which is really a shame, because after the game shifted from focusing on maps to just running around a small island, it simply got boring. (And don't get me started on having to build scaffolding in the world to not drown every other step, its tedious and extremely unfun) This could have been a fantastic game had it just stuck to its original idea.

Recommend is such a funny thing here. Map Map is a good game, as does what it does well, but I don't think this is for everybody, I think you need a strong sense of geometry and some amount of stubborness to enjoy this game. It does not hold your hand, and it can be hard to figure out what you are supposed to really be doing. Certainly try the demo before you buy this one.

A cute game about surveying and navigating with simple tools. The writing and art style are evocative of a childrens book, but the problem-solving required to complete some of the challenges is such that you don't feel like you're playing a game made for kids. You're given objects or features in the game world to plot on a map that's usually just the coastline of whatever island you're on (and sometimes not even that- later maps frequently have large blank spots for you to fill in), and a very simple set of tools that expands as you progress through the game. By the end you'll be planting flags to serve as surveying marks, finding the height of objects using the Pythagorean theorem, and marking points based entirely on marks you yourself defined and with whatever accuracy you can manage. Notably absent is any precision angle measuring tool. You get a compass in the latter part of the game, but it's limited to secondary intercardinal directions (i.e. ENE) marked, so you can reliably get ~32 points or ~11 degree precision out of that because you can pretty reasonably measure the halfway point between compass marks, though your only way of plotting this on the map is using a pair of dividers on a compass rose in the corner. A proper azimuth compass and a protractor as later stage unlocks might be cool; or, you actually do get a tool to measure vertical angles in the sextant (which also automatically solves Pythagoras for you so you get both slant range, height above or below eye level, and straight line distance), it ight be neat to be able to turn that sideways and use it to measure horizontal angles as was done historically. That might trivialize some challenges in the game, but the map design is usually pretty good about doing things like limiting sightlines and such to make it challenging to accurately plot points even when you have the full toolset. For $14.99, it's an easy recommend, I got more than 14 hours of play time out of it and I haven't done all the side objectives. There's decent replay value as well with the ability to place arbitrary targets on the map to create your own challenges, though it'd be nice to see maybe some additional challenge maps to extend that, or perhaps more tools to author and share your own challenges. This is one of those games where autism is a buff. If that interests you, grab it.

Ожидали вызов топографическому кретинизму? Триангуляцию? Мох на севере? Азимут? Ориентирование по заметным объектам? Всё это в игре имеется в виду, но -- не используется! Инструменты для картографирования выдаются в конце игры и они уже не нужны, тут загадки построены так, что проще и эффективнее перебором потыкать, чем пытаться по-умному привязаться к заметной точке, расчертить и посчитать. Уровни построены отвратительно, заметные объекты перекрываются "мусором", ландшафтом и находятся на разных высотах, а инструмента для не прямых вычислений у тебя не будет вплоть до конца игры, секстант тебе выдадут под конец, а подзорная труба измеряет прямое расстояние до точки наблюдения и топографическое расстояние ты не узнаешь хотя бы потому что не можешь узнать угол к горизонту. Игра просто не доделана, как только начинаются болота (середина игры) -- всё, начинается тупой перебор искомых точек.