Rex: Another Island

[quote]Follow my Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41363546-Fruit-N-Doggie-Reviews/]Fruit N Doggie Reviews,[/url] so you can be updated whenever I post a new review.[/quote] [h1]Overall Rating - Mediocre ★★★☆☆[/h1] [h1]First Impressions[/h1] Considering this is a game about dinosaurs, and the title is Rex: Another Island (RAI), I'd imagine we're a classic T Rex. Assuming my hunch is correct, the game is considerably less violent than I might have guessed for the species we're playing as. So, what the heck are we doing if not mauling other dinosaurs? We're gathering a ton of coins and some magic gems, I guess. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] Upon first starting RAI, I was getting confused by the different inputs, as they either seemed pointless, or counter-productive. Aside from jumping, I was able to zoom out the screen, bring up a blue bubble, and kill myself to return to a spawn point. However, in the right context, they're all useful. Zooming out the screen is quite handy, as it allows you to check different routes and better ways of getting to coins, instead of running into a death trap on accident. It also brings up the checklist for each area, and how many coins you're still missing. The blue bubble allows you to warp to specific areas once you find them on the map, so that's why it seems useless early on. Honestly, triggering a respawn really only helps if you wind up returning to an area with nothing left to find, and you want to return to where you started. However, if you activated another save point, it won't help that much anyways. These mechanics add some novelty to what's otherwise a pretty simple platformer. It does have some tricky areas to navigate, but it's a small game otherwise. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3448935957 [h1]Controls[/h1] As long as you're careful about not accidentally respawning when you don't want to, the controls are fairly decent. There were some precise jumps and tight areas to navigate, but I was able to make everything work with my controller. [h1]Story[/h1] I can't really say this game has a story when there's no introduction, and the closest you ever get to learning about the protagonist or the world he lives in, is when you see one of the three endings. Each of these is made up of a single image with a short summary, which is the equivalent of receiving a thank you card, “Oh, so he shared those items with his friends. How nice.” An effort was made, but not very much of one. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3448936596 [h1]Visuals[/h1] You can tell that this game is built from a tile system, as all the larger objects are built out of the same block being used repeatedly. There's nothing wrong with using a grid system like this though, especially if it makes for decent looking environments. Transitioning from one location to another can be a bit abrupt since it's so drastic a difference, but I like most of the biomes. The forest, mountainous areas, and empty town convey their atmosphere well. Admittedly, some of the choices might have been a bit on the nose, such as making almost everything within the sewers green. In reality, there's quite a bit of gray from all the concrete and metal, but most people think of less pleasant matter filling such spaces, hence the choice of color. [h1]Sound Design[/h1] Each of the significant locations has its own song, but some of the shorter ones didn't get a unique track. It seems reasonable enough to me, as those can be navigated so quickly, the music would hardly start before you're moving on. I'm not sure if each track is a great match for its location, such as the fast-paced bop for the ice lake, as I'd envision something much more mellow and calm. Regardless of whether they necessarily matched each locale well or not, I did enjoy the chip tune compositions, as they were well made. I really enjoyed the grungy-sounding airship song. There were a few sound effects that are kind of annoying, such as the ticking down of the flag reactivating, or when you respawn. However, those noises aren't too loud, and don't overstay their welcome. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3448935766 [h1]Pros[/h1] 🌟 With plentiful checkpoints scattered all over the place, even the hardest platforming sections are kept reasonably short. 🌟 The character handles well. [h1]Cons[/h1] ❌ You can play the entire game with a controller, but can't navigate the menu screen without using a mouse. It seems like a silly oversight to me. ❌ I question the hit boxes of enemies, because I swear I'd land dead center on a bird, but die anyways. [h1]Tips[/h1] 🔍 Whenever you reach a checkpoint, all the coins you gathered disappear because you own them. However, everything else that changed, such as enemies you killed, immediately respawns. 🔍 You can double jump anytime after making the first jump. In some places, a late double jump is the best way to get just high enough to reach a platform, while dodging the obstacle. 🔍 The easy way to navigate ice is to stop moving right after landing. Use your jumps to move left and right, because there's no ice physics to worry about. [h1]Final Thoughts[/h1] Considering how this is such a small game, I'd have expected it to be a $1 bargain bin title, but even for sale, it's going for $2. Everything is relative, but I find it to be a little high of an asking price, when most people could sweep the achievements in under two hours, without having to try that hard. Putting aside the price tag, RAI won't last anybody very long, even if they do everything possible. My own clear time was about 70 minutes, and there's really no reason for doing a second playthrough, unless you wanted to speedrun it. That makes reviewing this title kind of awkward. It's essentially a harmless game, with enough checkpoints to justify the small scattering of tricky platforming sections. However, even if one wanted practice at difficult jumps, that'd be such a niche reason for getting it. If I were recommending this to my past self, I'd probably suggest skipping it, because it's not that distinct from any other platformer. You probably won't regret playing it, but won't get much from doing so either. [table] [tr] [th]PC Specs[/th] [th]Performance[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Ryzen 2700 RTX 2070 16GB RAM ADATA SSD 1920x1080 [/td] [td]The game ran without incident on default settings. 💖 - RAI is healthy [/td] [/tr] [/table]

Why does the camera move so wildly? What are the doors doing? Or the tent things? Am I collecting coins for any purpose? This game's platforming is ruined by the terrible camera, really makes the game confusing and makes me dizzy. It's a real shame it's implemented so poorly.

Rex: Another Island is a retro Platformer game. The game starts out easy and becomes very hard later on, but with the amount of checkpoints that is forgivable. The moving platforms are incredibly buggy however and that's extremely frustrating. The graphics are very nice for retro graphics and the music is good. The game doesn't really have a story but that doesn't matter. I have a HUGE GRIPE against this game however, as it conveniently shows your progress in collecting all coins (for a special ending/achievement) and my checklist was all messed up! At some point I got to 774 coins and every single areas completed on the checklist with a checkmark at the end (the keyboard X menu), but for some reason... the 777 coins door wouldn't open! That includes the hard to find ones and the secret one, so that's not an user error. To continue on this very peculiar bug, I explored the entire game and found the 3 missing coins approximately 30 minutes later, in an area I had never seen before in Mountain. I found 3 coins just laying there while I'm at 45/45 completion on top of the screen. So I grabbed them and they counted as if I had never grabbed them before, my total on the X menu didn't change and it still shows I have only 773 coins, while the game now shows I have 777 instead of 774 coins! Mind-blowing bug, but I lost 1 hour in total trying to figure out this bug. Overall, this is a very mixed review, because that bug drove me crazy.

I usually dislike spikes-n-saws platformers (you know the type), they're absolutely not my thing, but this one's quite graceful in their use and provides you with checkpoints after every tiniest platforming section, never becoming a (too) frustrating chore. Still made me sweat though - good thing it doesn't overstay its welcome. The one unbroken level gimmick is also impressive, definitely one of the main features that kept me going for all of the collectibles and endings. Not to mention that the game as a whole is so utterly charming, from the lovingly crafted 8-bit pixelart to the cute and memorable soundtrack.

Rex: Another Island is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This is pretty generic stuff with a selection of common low effort platformer features like jumping down through the floor in some sections, double jumping and so on. You control a dinosaur, but when the graphics are this bad, well, a pixel blob is a pixel blob is a pixel blob. And there's a lot of pixel blob here. At best I guess this is a C- Mario Bros ripoff (the latest Mario Bros games have considerably better graphics, gameplay and level design). One thing I will say, however, is that the level design isn't the worst I've seen, and there's a lot of checkpoints, so this is a case of the developer being somewhat considerate towards gamers. The lack of punishment for screwing up makes the game more accessible and welcoming, and appealing to a broad audience is a pro-gamer move. It's a shame that doesn't extend to the technical execution for the game. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls and game handling are notably very floaty and imprecise. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing or polish done. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this game was never accepted on the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the poor choice of using node-webkit/NW.js instead of a serious game engine. This is a very poor quality toolset for gaming, sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities because it's primary function for games is to make simple HTML/browser/simple mobile apps rather than full fledged PC games (and given we are here for PC games, you can see why this is a problem). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 8 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Rex: Another Island is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

Редкое для платформера сочетание удобного управления, выверенной сложности и продолжительности. Не ломает пальцы и не коверкает психику, как старшие представители жанра: Super Meat Boy, Cuphead или, прости Господи, классический Ninja Gaiden с приставки NES. Было приятно достать со дна Steam жемчужину, пусть и совсем крохотную.

Great game. What more do you need than dinosaurs? I think it's worth the price and it also goes on sale for less than $1 so keep an eye on it. Other small games like this usually take an hour or less, but this took a pretty good chunk of time. I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing it. I hope there will be a second game sooner or later.

This game is complete garbage. On a technical level, the graphics are drawn by a 4-year-old, the music is horrendous, and every time you move, the camera swivels back and forth. I have no idea who designed this game but I'm shocked that none of the (positive) reviews seem to even mention this. Every time you move left or right, the camera moves to position the player character off-center, then when you stop moving, it re-centers the player character. EVERY time you move, this happens. Why was this done? It legitimately makes this game unplayable, not to mention makes me sick. Has the developer ever played another game before? Now moving on to the game aspects. Well, there is no level design, in fact I've seen randomly generated levels that were better designed than this crap. The enemies are basically nothing. Friggin Atari games are more fun than this. 74 cents spent that I am refunding. Since this "game" isn't even worth spending any more brain cells on, I'd just like to make an aside that I find it interesting that Steam's refund policy seems to state that refunds are not there to "try out" games. I don't really see why it's a problem though, how else are people supposed to know what is good among the metric tonne of "games" released daily onto the platform? Either do proper content curation, or the indie scene will simply die if risk-averse people don't want to end up with an unplayable piece of crap like this.

A neat little collectathon platformer that only takes 1-2 hours to 100% (online walkthrough may be required for how to get the 2 extra endings). One thing to be aware of is that it does not support the controller's analog stick for movement, though of course you can map it in via third party utilities, or Steam Client's own controller mapping UI. I used JoyToKey myself, and the only issue was that I still couldn't jump down through platforms unless using the D-Pad.

Very short, but it's a fun little platformer. Also, the music is pretty good.