Valkie 64

This was the single worst completionist experience of all time. This game's systems, fundamentally, do not work. The enemies have unreadable patterns or are super easy to cheese (no in-between), the parry either fails to work or works too well, the final gauntlet is too long for a boss that is a glorified dodge checker on hard mode, the dungeon design in some levels (desert for instance) has potential to be interesting but are ignored due to stupid additions, etc. The most frustrating part of this game is that it has potential to be a really good callback to the N64 action-adventure games people love, but the developer REFUSES to listen to genuine criticism because he doesn't care. This game is frustrating. There are positives: the music is nice, the concepts have potential, and the art reminds me of N64 games in a good way. Despite this, the problems exist in spades

At first, I was worried about whether I’d like the game based on the reviews. In particular, people often mentioned that the controls—or rather, the combat—didn’t feel right. I played it with an Xbox controller and was satisfied. The game actually seems to be designed more for mouse and keyboard. Still, I find the controls better with a controller. The game is clearly reminiscent of the Zelda games for the N64. It has similarities to Zelda, but feels like a very shallow copy of it. The game’s strengths are its short playtime and the fact that, as a player, I have the freedom to choose which area I want to tackle first. In total, there are 4 areas and 4 temples, covering the themes of forest, volcano, ice, and desert. As I mentioned earlier, the game feels shallow, which is why the temples aren’t nearly as exciting as in Zelda. Still, the game was a nice experience for me. If the game had been much longer, I would have rated it differently. It costs less than €6, so go for it.

Looks like an N64 3D adventure game, plays like a PS1 3D adventure game. I will play it to completion, probably.

Just to be clear : this game isn't Ocarina of Time. It looks like it, it kinda sounds like it, it may plays like it at a first glance, but the quality is definitely not there. With that out of the way, it IS a fun game, as long as you keep your expectations in check. [h1] Graphics [/h1] Of course, they are extremely inspired by the N64, so in that sense, they are quite nice. If you squint a little bit, you might be able to confuse it for a real N64 game, if it wasn't for the lighting system, which is way too modern. It is actually quite good, it just looks a little weird with the low-poly characters and low-resolution textures, it's almost in the uncanny valley. It doesn't bother me, but I could understand if some people didn't like it. [h1] OST [/h1] Honestly, the music is fine. It's too repetitive, there's only like three songs for each zone, and you WILL hear the same song for dozens of minutes, especially in dungeons, but at least, the compositions are pretty inoffensive, and even good in most cases, I just wish we got more. [h1] Story [/h1] Yeah, there's barely any story. Basically, bad goddess is back, stop her by collecting the magical MacGuffins, that's it. There's a little more implied lore, but really little, don't expect an epic tale. [h1] Level-Design [/h1] It's fine for the most part. The different overworlds are pretty big and there's a decent amount of exploration to find the numerous secrets, and I was never really lost, the creator was able to make most places pretty distinctive. The dungeons are... decent. They're basically all designed under the same idea, a main room with a single unlocked path that makes you circle the entire dungeon to find the Boss Key while opening shortcuts to go back where you were. It's nothing revolutionary, but it's serviceable. [h1] Gameplay [/h1] That's the absolute worse part of the game : the gameplay just sucks. Your character feels incredibly heavy, the sword is incredibly slow and the jumping in really imprecise. The enemies barely respond to your hits, and the hit boxes are so bad, half the time I get hit, I don't understand why, same thing when you're trying to hit the enemies. There's also a guard button that lets you counter-attack, I think it was added in a free update, it helps a ton, but it's still incredibly buggy. If you try to use it with multiple enemies or on a big one (like the tentacle boss), the game doesn't know what to do, it either still hurts you (but still blocks you in the guard animation), or makes you totally unvulnerable, but sends you across the screen (usually in spikes or other enemies) and kills you. All of that should be fine, it's not totally unplayable, if it wasn't for the next issue. [h1] Difficulty [/h1] The difficulty is pure BS. The enemies do crazy damage, they take a ton of hits before dying, and worse of all, THERE'S NO CHECKPOINT! The first three dungeons are fine, but the fourth one was hell on my first playthrough (yes, I said first). There are a lot of mobs everywhere that takes forever to kill, there are spikes that just eat up your health, the enemies can hit you during door transition (and there are a lot of them in that dungeon), they keys take forever to get, and if you die at any point, the dungeon resets basically from the beginning (the shortcuts are still open, but the locked doors are locked again, and you need to get back all the keys, so does it really matter if you need to do everything anyway?). The final dungeon basically took me an hour, which at this point, was around a third of my playtime, just doing the same thing over and over again and hoping I wouldn't get killed during a door transition (and the game is incredibly stingy with health drop). The difficulty curve is also really messed up. The first two zones are really easy, the third one has substantial increase, and the fourth one is hell. If it wasn't enough, in an update, the developer added a new zone in the first overworld that you can open pretty quickly, which is by far the most difficult zone of the game. The item you get at the end is nice, but I took me probably an hour and a half to do it, and I had to come back near the end to even stand a chance (and it was still hard, even with all the upgrades). There's also a secret zone in the main hub, where you need to kill multiple enemies on small platforms, which is really annoying. It's not even that hard, but the plants kept falling off when I was trying to kill them, and when they do, they don't die, so the game wasn't unlocking the reward, I just had to reset the zone over and over again before finally being able to kill them. [h1] Achievements [/h1] Don't. I had to do three playthroughs of the game to do them all, and it was probably the most miserable time I had while trying to complete a game. Basically, they come down to "Finish the game, but harder". The absolute most annoying one was to finish the game with no upgrades at all, so that includes Hearts, Armours and Swords (you can still get the others, thanks for that I guess). After a while, all the enemies can one-shot you, while you spend a minute on each. I spent I think 3 hours on the fourth dungeon in that mode, before dying to the boss for the third time by being yeeted across the room while guarding into spikes. After that, I just cheated to get infinite health and honestly, I don't think I would've been able to defeat the final boss anyway, her pattern seems completely random, and her hit boxes are also broken. [h1] Conclusion [/h1] Honestly, I don't want to be rude about this game, I'm pretty sure it was developed by a single person, and you can see the passion behind it, but man, there are so many rough things that would've needed more playtesting and corrections. Do I recommend the game? Honestly, if you just want a short adventure game inspired by Ocarina of Time, sure. At least a 3/4 of the game was enjoyable despite the bad controls, and you can get over the last 1/4 with patience. If you want a polished experience and a lot of replayability, absolutely not, at least 7 hours of my total playtime was pure pain and I never want to do that again.

The combat is terrible, and really drags down the whole game. It's a shame as the game clearly had a lot of effort put into some of the environments and quests, but there's a reason they say to focus on just making the core systems fun alone even with greyboxing when staring game dev. Here the combat drags the whole game down. There also aren't really puzzles or complex switches etc. in the temples like in OoT. So just play Ship Of Harkinian instead of this, or wishlist Azaran and hope that turns out better.

Excellent

Good game! It takes focus to get use to the fighting, but it's only three buttons!

good game