SOLAR CAGE

Solar Cage is a first-person platformer with parkour elements. There’s also a shooting mechanic that works well; you have only one bullet. Kill an enemy and you get it back. The overall idea is good and there’s a nice little game hidden here, but it’s also very broken. - Clipping/broken levels; the first three stages do not give a positive impression. Everything is gray and you can’t tell where one platform ends and the other starts. You can get "devoured" by walls and wind up on the other side. If you're lucky, you'll come upon a solid piece of environment that will allow you to climb back. If you're unlucky, you'll clip through the environment and fall into an endless pit. What makes this situation even weirder is that there’s a floor at the bottom that supposed to kill you. In most cases it doesn’t work. But hit a plain-looking wall and you die. If you ignore the clipping issues, next stages look and play considerably better. However, the game still manages to thrown in new problems. Forcefields are one of the worst. These appear around battle arenas and disappear once all enemies have been defeated. However, they can sometimes activate too early, locking you outside and ruining your current run. - Levels (some or all, there’s no way of telling) have a hidden red screen – a data log with extra story bits, but the problem is that the prompt to interact didn’t show up. I only found out about this in the fifth stage, where I was able to interact with the screen. - Stages should be broken down into smaller chunks; there are currently nine stages with no checkpoints. When you think you've beaten a difficult section and are safe, the game throws you into another hazardous scenario that demands multiple tries and flawless precision. There isn't any space for error here. Hit a glitch and you’re back to square one. I understand the difficulty, but there should some amount of fun factor for a casual players as well. - Not enough information; at one point I had to jump a huge distance. Normal jump wasn’t strong enough so I thought you had to build up speed and maintain momentum. It didn’t work. The solution was to use the slide and jump right before the edge. I get that experimentation is fun, but this is the most used move throughout the game and should be explained in the tutorial. - Punching is pointless; the enemies shoot their bullets way too fast to be able to get close. - Enemies; when you destroy robots, their remains stay on the ground for a few seconds before disappearing. That’s all good until you slide into them. This slows you down and often causes your jump to be ruined. Enemies can see through walls as well. Every time you decide to jump out of cover, a bullet is waiting for you. This might be the biggest issue with this game. Homing bullets in the final stages that hit you in the back even when you dodge them make the whole thing unbearable. - Unnecessary steps between deaths; you need to click on the reboot button and then again on skip story, which shows up every single time. Double-click on the skip button and you’ll waste the bullet as soon as the game starts. The runs should restart automatically. - Broken ending; once you perform the final action, the screen and sound glitch out. If you go to the main menu, you have to do the final level all over again. I really wanted to like the game, the later levels are really good, especially the last three. Some fixes or additional testing would’ve made this a positive experience. In the end, it was all a waste of time due to a broken ending that didn’t even give me the one single achievement. This was the final straw.