The Blue Flamingo

нет

[h1][b]Not Recommended[/b][/h1]

3/10

👍

[h1][b]A Failed yet Cool “Handmade” Experimental Game[/b][/h1] [hr][/hr]The Blue Flamingo is a vertically scrolling shooter. Its main particularity is that all of the assets in the game (Background, enemies, even the very player) have been obtained from real-life handmade models, which is cool and is the main reason that spurred me to try the game. (TL,DR available at the bottom)[hr][/hr] [h1]Commands[/h1] [hr][/hr]When you first start the game, if you play with a controller, the commands are setted to very strange buttons… [list] [*]X = Confirm Menus / Shoot [*]Start = Pause / Cancel [*]B = Bomb [/list] Besides, the game doesn’t let you navigate the menus with the D-PAD and force you to use the LEFT ANALOG instead. Luckily the game follows the PC standard of letting the player change key bindings so it’s easy to change the buttons to our tastes, in my case: [list] [*]A = Confirm Menus / Shoot [*]Start = Pause / “Go-Back” Menus [*]X = Bomb [/list] The D-PAD incompatibility can be fixed by binding the D-PAD to the LEFT ANALOG “buttons” within the Steam Controller Configurator. Since i had the S.C.C. opened i also rebinded: the RIGHT TRIGGER to A (shoot [Pull that trigger!🙂]) the LEFT TRIGGER to X (bomb) the B button to START (letting me to go back in menus with “B” and pause the game with “START”) Fixed all issues with commands i finally started the game and… It was super-cool at the start! And then… progressively less and less cool :([hr][/hr] [h1]Player Health[/h1] [hr][/hr]The health of your plane is always visible in the lower left corner (a yellow circle which fills with red when you lose health) and is carried over from level 1 to the level where you die, there is no way to repair the plane. It seems like DEVS basically replaced lives with permanent health.[hr][/hr] [h1]Bomb[/h1] [hr][/hr]The player can use a bomb that kills all enemies on screen. After being used the bomb starts a cooldown of 40s (upgrades lower it) and the player won’t be able to use it for the duration of said cooldown (The cooldown is always visible through a smaller circle next to the health circle [a green circle which turns gray during cooldown and slowly fills with red till it becomes green again at the end of the cooldown].[hr][/hr] [h1]Variety[/h1] [hr][/hr]All levels have the same handmade background, and the fact that said background has 2 layouts (Day and Night) doesn’t help particularly to add variety. Enemies don’t seem to have variants (not even recolors)[hr][/hr] [h1]Transparency[/h1] [hr][/hr]At the end of each level the player has the chance to buy upgrades for his/her plane (the upgrades are GUN and BOMB) but the only infos the game provides about these upgrades are their cost and their name, not even a tiny little hint about what these upgrades are supposed to do…[hr][/hr] [h1]High Risk High Reward Mechanic[/h1] [hr][/hr]The game trailer exposes a supposed High-Risk High-Reward mechanic to supposedly rewards the player: “You get 10% of the money you didn’t spend on upgrades at the start of the next level.” But… this mechanic doesn’t do a great service… The problems i have with this mechanic are the following: [list] [*]10% is a negligible bonus. [*]The player probably will make more money upgrading and destroying the enemies (i.e. +upgrades = +money). [/list] The bonus might become useful on later upgrades which cost a lot but for the early levels the player is probably better served by just buying the upgrades ASAP and profit from enemies with the added firepower.[hr][/hr] [h1]”Bonus” Part: Target Practice[/h1] [hr][/hr]At the end of each level there is a “bonus” Part where some little targets will show up randomly from a corner of the screen and move rapidly to another corner of the screen (the higher the level the faster the targets). These targets can spawn green or red, if they are green they provide 100$ while if they are red they don’t provide money. Shooting at them while they’re red will turn them green while shooting at them while they’re green will turn them red. This is a good idea for giving the player some reason to not shoot all the time (something common in vertically scrolling shooters AFAIK). However, since the player plane fires cyclically from the left and the right wing... It’s not an easy task to accurately hit these little targets :)[hr][/hr] [h1][b]Conclusion / TL,DR[/b][/h1] [hr][/hr]The game shines more thanks to how IT HAS BEEN MADE than thanks to how IT IS. Do not misunderstand me: the handmade thing is really cool! But if we focus on the gameplay we have a repetitive game with poor commands (by default) which arbitrarily hides core informations and uses questionable “rewarding” mechanics. In a few words: [b]If we remove the handmade thing... Very little remains.[/b][hr][/hr]

10/10 for model building 1/10 for game play All the designers need to do is add some story aspects, better and smother ship movement, WAY less input stuttering and 1000 times more imagination into game-play and level/enemy design. and some actual power ups that have an effect on the ship. buy this if you like supporting model photography, avoid if you like playing games.

2/10

If a game requires you to restart from scratch every time you play, the beginning of the game needs to be really fun and interesting. Level 1 is tedius and easy, with very few enemy types. You'll play it a lot.

I really wanted to like this game. It looks so pretty and I'm a suckers for handmade models. I only paid $2.50 for it, but even at that price I don't feel like its worth it. The music is too pleasant for what is supposed to be a harrowing death race. There are no lives, only a health bar, but that's not the good news it sounds like it should be because there doesn't seem to be anyway to recover health. The money you earn can only be spent on gun and bomb upgrades. There are only two levels (Day and Night) with varying numbers of enemies. Sure, it says level 4, but i's the same as level 2. There are just blatant issues that any regular game maker could have seen and addressed. So if you're coming here from Game Dungeon and you think it looks really cool, you're right, but temper all other expectations.

Cute, simple, short lived. It misses control inputs often, resulting in your ship sliding uncontrollably at random unexpected times. Unforgivable bug in a genre of precision. It has only two levels which is the same map but day/night. Since it's stop motion, it does look very different, lighting and all. Once you've seen both levels, there's not much else to see. Wish this had more energy behind it. I do love stop motion.