[quote][i]This is the [b]43rd[/b] review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found [b][url=https://youtu.be/3V-6a7CqVv8]here[/url][/b].[/i][/quote]
[b]In summary, I don’t recommend this game and as a numerical score, I’d give it a 4/10[/b]. On the up, the environmental art and [i]most[/i] of the music is well constructed. However, this game is held back by a couple of game-breaking bugs, poorly implemented speech in conjunction with an overall hollow world and story, and roughly functional gameplay with pointless designs, poorly thought-out knockback system and suspected dropped inputs when the game features precision platforming elements.
[h2]Introduction[/h2]
I came across this game via a coupon that Steam gave me for putting together a Hades badge, because Steam loves it when opposites attract. Seeing that the game wasn’t doing [i]that[/i] good made it a perfect Redlight candidate.
In FalconDev’s first and only game [b]The Princess Adventure[/b], or TPA for short, you play as a nameless, seemingly silent princess in a war-torn nation whose main economic tools [i]seems[/i] to be that it’s an Amazon fulfillment center with how many boxes are shown throughout the first stage. There’s even a warehouse(?) that’s made up entirely of boxes? Unfortunately no boxes inside of boxes.
Anywhoo, the story beat, if you have the patience to watch it scroll by at its own pace, is that a Prince has come from another nation to bring the two regions together and end whatever strife has been occurring. In his infinite wisdom, he Naruto-ran ahead of his traveling party so that he’d have more one-on-one time with the princess. This witch shows up to exact vengeance against the Prince’s nation, and what better way than to kidnap him while the Princess stands idly watching? After the abduction, the Princess consults her guards who say that she should locate the Princess alone otherwise their mobilization efforts may alarm the Prince’s nation. Exactly how far ahead did this Prince get from his party?
The gameplay elements are plentiful, but simple. Of the most important, there’s you get to swing a sword, jump, throw some knives, self-heal, and collect coins. If you manage to bunch up 25 coins in your coin-purse, you get another life in this limited-life game. You’ll travel through four distinct biome — the plains ft. an Amazon warehouse, a cave, and a swamp and along the way this game will challenge you with four bosses. If you’re more comfortable playing with a controller, the game is partially controller compatible with only the menu elements requiring a keyboard and mouse for input.
In terms of total gameplay time it took me 2.7 hours to beat the game; if not for some faults I probably could’ve beaten it in about 2 hours. The keenest of eyes will notice I have no achievements, so bestow upon me your sympathy.
That’s about everything I need to cover, so let’s talk about what I liked.
[h2]The Good[/h2]
The game features some great environmental art — the character sprites are perfectly fine but the level visuals are by far and large the best aspect of this game. While the cave is a little more drab than the other two biomes, there’s not a whole lot you can do with them I feel, and I think the developer did a commendable job in that space all things considered. The one gripe I have is that one biome just has circular saws strung up on wire and it seems out of place.
Trailing that, I found the music largely okay. Each biome has its own song and The tracks are suitable for the game that they’re in and aren’t over-produced or overly theatrical. I do have some reservations about the boss song which is consistent with all four encounters and there’s this light-hearted bell (chime?) that is ill-fitted for an otherwise antagonizing track.
That’s about all that I really enjoyed, so let’s talk about what I liked a little less.
[h2]The Ungood[/h2]
To start with the lesser of all the evils; I ran into two game-breaking bugs. One repeatable, and one at random. For some context, there exists a downward spike attack that you can do by jumping and pressing the down directional button. When doing this shortly after concluding the main story beat’s dialogue, I had the Princess perform this on an enemy which resulted in her getting stuck, unable to move and forcing me to reload. This happened twice before I decided to [i]stop[/i] doing that move out of fear of losing progress and time. For the other, the game just [i]randomly[/i] crashed at a point where I was heavily frustrated with the game in the swamp biome, so it came at a terrible time.
Next up are the story-telling elements. Speech in this game is [i]really[/i] frustrating. There’s no voice-acting, so it’s all text-box scrolling. In some instance you can press a button to generate all the elements, but the main dialogue between the Princess and the Prince at the beginning seems to be misconfigured as if you press any button twice (to generate the text and then to advance the bubble) you skip [b]the whole exchange[/b] with the Prince, the Witch, and the Guards, missing [b]the entire dominant plot point[/b] and I had to restart the game three times because I just thought I was doing something wrong and didn’t want to miss the dialogue. This frustration in combination with that this world is missing a lot of world-building details just leaves this void that isn’t appropriately filled at any point in the game by any of your encounters.
Lastly, the gameplay is feeling really rough around the edges. For the smaller things, there’s some dead-end gameplay designs — for one there’s no real need to gain lives in this game as there’s no advantage to having lives since you can just reload from the plentiful save points the game introduces to you. Additionally, there’s when you get hit your character gets knocked [i]backwards[/i] and there are [b]no invincibility frames[/b], leading to some instances where you’ll get hit and them immediately get knocked back into a herd of enemies that’ll kill you in [i]a [b]second[/b][/i]. Moving onto the boss fights — only the [i]very first one[/i] was a challenge. The others you just stand (or jump) near and just… hit ‘em. Sometimes you might [i]want[/i] to avoid damage, but you hurt them a lot faster than they hurt you. Then lastly, there was one very precise platforming section where your inputs will need to be on precise and I really don’t think this game was configured in a way that reconciles with what you’re seeing on the screen. I went as far as setting up an input register to see if I was misinterpreting my own skill for the game’s shortcoming, but after seeing the input register I feel like there are some improvements to be made in the wall-jump mechanic’s hopping window as it’s far too tight.
[h2]The End[/h2]
For a first game, the game isn’t bad. But at this price point and no sign of the developer making further improvements there are little reasons to play TPA when there game doesn’t even want to give you achievements for your patience and perseverance. :(
[quote][i]If you’re into curator groups, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38757311/]we have one of those[/url]*.* Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:[/i][/quote]
https://youtu.be/3V-6a7CqVv8
