[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38287655-Prof.Vaharrak/]Prof.Vaharrak's Curator Group - Almost 30 years of gaming experience at your service[/url]
This action platformer game is sold on the premise that it "was created by children. Characters, level design, graphic design and story were created by young artists." And it shows.
Some in-game elements clearly point to this fact, the voice lines sound like children, there's no explicit violence (as far as I could tell) and the puzzles and platforming are pretty simple. There are, however, a few elements I have to question in terms of their inclusion and quality.
First, the audio is all over the place. There are volume sliders, but no matter what you set them to, some voice lines are way too low and it took me a while to realize my character was actually talking every now and then, levelling the audio effects would go a long way in fixing this issue. Algonside this, there's no explanation of how anything works or what your mission is, you're just thrown out there. A platformer should be pretty self-explanatory, but then again, if this is intended for younger audiences, you'd want them to understand what is going on. Another thing is the fact that I couldn't really tell what the platforms were on the first level, besides a very faint glow when approached, I had to guess where I was meant to jump to next. A young kid would become very frustrated with this situation, easily.
Second, from what I could gather, Hitler has escaped his grave or has resurrected? And "WWII enemies are planning something evil", so a'ight, our hero has to stop him somehow. But I don't really agree with the fact there are prominent displays of nazi symbols in this game, down to the fact some enemies will blurt out german lines when shooting/defeated.
If the game is intended for younger audiences I have to question the portrayal of such elements. I do agree that, for as long as I played (up to level 3) there were no visible nazi soldiers, they were mostly soldiers inside trash cans just wandering about. I believe there would be better ways to go about doing this, but I ultimately respect the dev's decision if this was the vision for their game.
Number three, there's a few unpolished elements here and there. Controls can feel rough but since there's no pixel-perfect platforming, I can overlook that. But the reason I didn't play more than half-hour and only got to level 3 was that some boxes bugged out, got stuck and did not allow me to progress further into the level.
Everynow and then a puzzle or a level will require you to push some boxes to reach new areas or just to clear a path. In this case, the entrance to the next area was blocked and not even restarting the level fixed the boxes, preventing me from proceeding. As forgiving as I can be if this is indeed the product of children's efforts, I can't overlook game-breaking bugs.
The price is not unrealistic, the target audience I see playing a simple action platformer like this one is probably more within the range of 5-8 year olds nowadays, TOPS. It's unrealistic to expect anyone older than 10 will remain interested in this (or even care enough to play it, in all honesty). I hope the game is improved a little more to offer a good enough product, since, again, if this is indeed a children-developed game, it's not a bad start at all. Hopefully we'll see more of these creatively interesting projects in the future.
tl;dr 'A' for effort for a game in which the assets were made by children, but still needs quite the polish to get there. Thumbs up for the idea, but sideways due to it's many shortcomings.
