The cover art from the steam page got my attention right away, I’m a sucker for interesting looking platfomers. I blame it on those cute little yellow eyes, they almost smiled at me. I thought Shiny would be a fun loving little robot platformer with perhaps a quirky soundtrack and interesting mechanics involving robotic acrobatics. To my surprise, however, Shiny was quite different.
The main character is *not* actually named Shiny, but rather a robot named Kramer 227. Your objective is to save all the robots from an exploding planet. The humans inhabiting the planet decided to split and leave you and your companion robots to die - interplanetary kindness at its finest. There is a decently long cut scene to explain the whole story at the beginning of the game, and that is the extent of any story line. Now your robots buddies are all out of power and you have to charge them up so you can save them.
The robots are placed here and there in harder to reach areas. Generally, below or above where you would normally want to move. In each level there are supposed to be four hidden robots – at least in all the levels I played. Most of the time, I could only find two or three of them by the end of the level. Once you rescue two of them, it enables some sort of hyper charge boost that can be activated by pressing the Y game button on your controller or keyboard. If enabled, you renew your power and are fairly invincible for a brief time. Once used, though, it is gone forever unless you restart the level or find two more robots. Other than this charge boost, finding robots gets you some stats on the level completion as well.
As you walk along, you collect energy power capsules. These give you a small amount of health charge as your internal battery gets depleted from taking hits from falling rocks, bonking yourself, or just waiting too long to jump. You are in constant motion to replenish your power reserves, so these capsules keep you going until you get to the next checkpoint. Each little mistake, like being slapped on the butt with moving machinery, rescuing robots, and even shielding yourself will run your power dry.
[h1]GAMEPLAY[/h1]
Jumps would often be into a blind area on a platform. At first, I thought it was the “Leap of Faith” style of jumping, but after checking the controls you do have the ability to pan around a bit to see the next platform. However, that pan becomes unusable once you get to trapdoors in front of platforms. Since you have only two seconds to jump to the next area – which may or may not be visible – there is no way to pan and jump quickly. In the first half of the game you need to jump to these hanging platforms on wires, quick trapdoor platforms on steel girders, and moving platforms going up and down or side to side. It takes some time to get used to jumping without looking as it isn’t something a platformer typically wants you to do. Usually, you want to have a sense of where you are landing. With Shiny, you just guess where the platform will be and hope for a lot of checkpoint lives. This trial by error jumping was less than satisfying. Often I’d just aim for the edge of the wires and grit my teeth while waiting to see if I made it or not. If I have time to pan and look around, it’s much easier. However, there are sections that you will not have the time for that luxury, leaving only blind jumps to lead you through.
One major issue I had with Shiny is that controls sometimes feel off. I would often be at the edge of a platform and want to jump but instead I’d walk right off. Another example is that sometimes when you land there is a bit of a bounce step that will make you fall down even if you had a clean landing. Sometimes I would be in a good position in front of a moving piston and even before a piston came down to smash me I would fall down dead. I would not go so far as to say the controls are broken, but they definitely need tweaking.
When I first started Shiny, there was a issue with the controller using a button sequence of pressing RT and LB back and forth quickly. It wouldn’t register fast enough and I was forced to alternate between using a controller and the shift keys of my keyboard. After an update, this was fixed and I could easily cool down after traversing fire.
The gameplay was moving along briskly until level sixteen where, suddenly, the game screen went black. I could hear my character moving, but there was no way to see. I thought maybe I was missing some sort of flashlight button. Looking at the discussion group for Shiny, I saw a post about the exact same issue. I apparently was not alone with this bug.
Managing to find my save files, I tried them on a different computer – my laptop. Oddly, without a graphics card it loaded up level 16 just fine. The downside is that when using Intel HD 5500, the game could barely run. My guess is the Unreal 4 engine is too much for my onboard graphics. Setting the graphics to the lowest resolution and lowest detail settings, I was able to get about 20-25 FPS on an I5 CPU with Intel 5500 and 8GB of ram.
From here on, I was able to finish the game.
I tried playing Shiny on both Normal and Easy settings. From what I gathered, the only difference was that Easy gave me more lives at the checkpoints. There was no actual difference in the gameplay. That said, halfway through I proceeded to restart the game on Easy rather than play with the small amount of lives I had on the Normal settings. The Save/Checkpoint system on Normal didn’t have enough lives during some of the levels and it required repeating the entire level from the beginning.
There are no puzzles in the game that I could see. The levels were entirely platforming with no storyline sections. Platforming is well designed for difficulty, but its all jumping from one platform to the next and avoiding pitfalls. No bouncing off walls, no double jumps, no power up bonuses, no unlockables, no shooting or throwing objects. It’s very basic in its content. Towards the end of the game, there is variety with a jetpack but that is it. The platforming itself is well thought out in difficulty. If you just try to jump back and forth you’ll likely bonk your head and fall down. You have to be aware of the limited space in which to move upwards and note your jumping positions. The main difficulties tend to be in avoiding moving objects from crushing you or jumping for a platform and simply missing it. That sounds incredibly simple in structure, but Shiny looks less for levels that require pinpoint accuracy to finish and more at time dependent movements and blind faith jumping.
[h1]FINAL THOUGHTS[/h1]
From what I played, I can say Shiny is an example of pure platforming without any extra features. Some may like it, some may not. Personally, I feel it needs some revamping if Shiny is to succeed at getting a larger group of gamers interested. The controls still need some tweaking even after the update. Towards the end, the levels just do not feel very complete. You get odd camera angles that block the view of platforms and a few times my health bar got stuck. Perhaps after some updates and bug fixes this game will be more accessible. The developer seems quite nice and is trying to address many issues with a complete reworking of the game. In it’s current state, however, I can’t recommend it. After another update, it may be something to look at again. Shiny does feel like a labor of love and I’m rooting for the next version of the game to be better.
