Red Game Without A Great Name

喜+1

Playing The Red Game after its successor, Green Game: Timeswapper may make this review a bit skewed. The core objective in both games are the same - navigate the Bird through some obstacle-ridden scenes to the target cage, and collect all three cogs if possible. How to do that differs significantly though - in Green you only control the environment, while in Red you control the Bird directly - drag and drop to teleport it to another area of the screen. That's our first problem right here - while the control method is intuitive, it doesn't make much sense as you're only ever teleporting the Bird. So why not only point to the destination? Because then the game would be so easy, of course. Needlessly complicating the control method to increase difficulty is a pretty bad design choice, I believe, and additionally, the controls are not really accurate. Combine that with the other glaring issue (also present in Green), that the game is unable to detect collissions accurately, and you have a recipe for disaster. But... no. Even like this, Red manages to be fun and entertaining, if sometimes infuriating for the wrong reason. The level design is more consistent than in Green, fewer clever tricks but also (much) fewer lame filler levels. The visuals and the music are similarly fetching, and up to level fifty-something, I was having a great time. And then the rotating levels came in. Quickly rotating screen + sloppy controls + bad collision detection = why am I still playing this game? Listening to my inner completionist, I suffered through most of these levels, but at the end level 60 just proved to be to much of a waste of time, not to mention the slowly developing nausea. Too bad. At the end, there's much to like about The Red Game, but obviously, I'm recommending it with quite a bit of caution. It's not for everybody.