Recent reviews by merfab76

I can't even remember last time I had such an horrible experience with a game ...

So, here's how it went (specs : Windows 11, Intel i5-12600KF, RTX 3070Ti, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, game installed on SSD) :

- First install, launch the game : nope, you need the latest visual c++ redistributable package
- okay, manually downloaded the latest and installed it
- launch the game : nope, crash e3010509 after the logos
- back to Internet to search for this error. Tried every solution : verify game files (no effect), start as administrator (no effect), add exceptions to firewall and anti-virus (no effect), uninstall and re-install the anti-cheat engine (no effect)
- then, when I was about to give up, it finally worked, no idea what actually fixed it
- okay cool then, let's start playing : nope, despite specs which should allow me to play without problems, the game has micro-freezes every time I move the mouse
- back to Internet again, trying everything : lower the mouse polling rate, which was already at 500Hz anyway (no effect), play on low settings (no effect), choose hardware cursor in options (no effect), unplug everything except mouse (no effect), terminate all background programs (no effect), update to the latest NVidia drivers (no effect), lower the resolution (I usually play in WQHD, no effect)

So, for now, the game is just unplayable, I never even finished the initial (tutorial) level and lost some 4 or 5 hours to achieve ... nothing.

Add to that the annoying shaders, which take ages to generate the first time (and with all those tests, not only the first time actually), and are still long to load afterwards.

So for now, I dropped the ball, I'm gonna wait for the next big update (the 1.03 hotfix which came out yesterday changed absolutely nothing, of course) to see if things get better, but right now, it's just a huge waste of time.

I'll relunctantly give it a positive review : it's a well done game, a nice change of setting for a minesweeper, it can be considered educative too.

But I finished it on my 1st (and only) playthrough, all achievements included, in 29 minutes (without skipping the short cutscenes before each level). My personal threshold for the value of a game being 1€ for 1 hour of gameplay, it means that this game should not cost more than 0.5€. Of course, this is a personal point of view, do of it what you want :P

Also, the game being still tagged as "profile features limited" at this point (end of july 2021), the achievements and the perfect game status won't be accounted for on your profile.

Excellent match 3 variation, where you must use the match patterns presented to you, finish each level in a given number of moves and with the number of required colours, and optionally get the "secret" flowers in the process. In addition, some blocks can give you an additional move, some of them are frozen until you "match" them a few times, and on some levels, blocks can fall "sideways".

All of this with a nice and relaxing design. Definitely recommended.

A great lightweight (as far as I can tell : basically no cpu impact, around 100 MB of memory) application, with plenty of useful tools.

The base version is free and already has a lot of built-in tools, you have a 3 days trial to try everything, and you can even select one tool for free every day, and each day a random one will also be available to try. So, no reason to not give this a try and see if it suits your needs.

Besides, the dev is very available and receptive to suggestions, so bonus points for that :)

The only things I don't like much are :
- there are so many things available that's it's sometimes a bit tough to find what you're looking for (there's a search function for that, luckily)
- the UI is not always very practical, and could probably be more "streamlined" to make things a little bit easier.

Again, I'd recommend to try it out, you might very well find some things useful for you in there.

Surprisingly, it's actually a pretty good game :)

I don't think I need to explain what's it's about :P ... But you have "science" points (you gain 1 every level, and you can buy more with money) which allow you to increase bonuses (more money crates, more rocket boost, and so on), or decrease others (less drag, less obstacles and so on). You also have several items which can be bought (helmet, rocket, wings, ...) to help you go farther.

There are only 2 problems with this game :
- the progression is much too slow, whether in experience points or in money. Currently, after 17 hours, I'm barely above level 70 (the "endgame" being level 100, it seems, but you'll probably have to keep playing beyond that if you want to have all high level items), and I can't even buy all items for this level. And the more you advance, the longer your flights will be, making it even slower.
- I don't like the fact that the camera will get to the side the higher you fly. In such cases, you don't see ahead, making any kind of "strategy" (using wings to avoid birds) completely impossible.

Other than that, good fun overall, no bugs as far as I can tell, recommended.

A good puzzle game with a "refreshing" indian background, definitely recommended.

A shame it did not attract much attention, as it's still in the "profile features limited" state (meaning its achievements won't be counted by Steam until more people buy and play this game).

Tried it a few years ago, it seemed fine, but it remained in my backlog.

Tried to play it again today (march 2019) on Windows 10, and totally unable to start it : it seems to launch (the screen turns black) then it's back to desktop, with a crashlog (binary, so unable to tell what's wrong).

Tried a few things (most common problems seem to be related to DirectX) : validate local files, reinstall, drop a few dx DLLs in the game folder, all to no avail. As far as I can tell, this game is now unplayable.

How to ruin a perfectly good game ?

At the core, you have a pretty decent drifting game, kind of similar to Absolute Drift (which I did recommend). The driving is rather good (though I think it was a bit better in Absolute Drift), you have plenty of different tracks (50 in normal mode, 50 more in hardcore though some are just reversed or with a slighly different layout) ranging from asphalt to ice, plenty of different cars, with different weigths, speeds, accelerations and grips.

The goal is to score up tp 8 stars by track :

- 4 for time trials (beat the normal and expert times, for 1 lap and for the overall race)
- 3 for race against AI : finish 3rd or better, finish 1st, and 1st without any damage
- 1 for a race against the police (chasing you).

Getting stars unlock tracks, which are scattered on a world map, on which you drive to get from one track to the other.

Time trial is perfectly fine and can be enjoyed on its own (at least on normal mode, where stars are rather easy to get). Multiplayer is dead (I've seen at most 3 people online, and that's probably including me), so forget about the corresponding achievements. Race against AI is a mess, as well as police chases.

First, AI cheats rather obviously (outperforms you even with inferior cars among other things). Second, even the lightest touch on a AI car (whether it's your fault or theirs) will end up 99% of the time in your defavor, sending you anywhere but on the right track (and don't even think you can push them away). Third, when an AI rams you and you get damaged, you lose the opportunity to get the corresponding star, even though you did nothing wrong. As a result, races against AI are an exercise in frustration, ruining the fun of the game.

Police chases are not better, the advantage they have is so huge that winning these stars is just a matter of luck (most of the time, you'll get caught in the first 20 seconds).

The world map is not only totally useless, it's much too big, meaning you can't see all available races even when fully zoomed out. And driving on it takes too much time. Also, I found one track without a start line, making it utterly useless, and another where the police apparently forgot they had to chase you (they were nowhere to be seen, at least that was an easy star ...).

That's not all : on my first "playthrough" (something like the first dozen tracks), things (especially regarding AI races) were not so bad. But there was a message ingame saying a beta was ongoing with an upcoming update that would reset your progress. No more information than that in the forums. Then (end of november I think), the game was updated 3 times, without a single update/note on the product page or the forums about what was being updated. At the end of the third update, sure enough, I lost my progess. Problem is (apart from the lack of communication) : this was supposed to be a finished product, not a fricking early access.

But worse : with this update, the races against AI, already frustrating as described above, became even worse. And also, all cars became magically unlocked (so, forget about getting the corresponding achievements for unlocking them), and I think all tracks on normal mode too. And the game stopped remembering what camera you prefer (top down or 3rd person), making you switch it every time (minor, but annoying).

In the end, I got something like (out of 400 for each mode) 335 stars in normal mode, and 75 in hardcore where I'm stuck because not enough stars to unlock next tracks. And I'm uninstalling, because every possibility of having fun is gone (getting stars now is just a matter of playing the same tracks ad nauseam hoping the AI will mess up).

You can stil have fun with time trials on normal mode, that's roughly 1/3 of what the game is supposed to be, but the overall mess tells me I can't recommend this game. A shame, because it could have actually been great :(

Ok puzzle game, artwork is nice, but everything is a bit too dark, making the task more than often difficult.

The dev seems willing to enhance the game, which is a plus (just added an option to outline the pieces, for example, to counter the darkness).

In the end, recommended if you're looking for a puzzle game and like the art style, otherwise not so much (aka this would be a neutral review if it was possible).

Given the price, I won't say I'm awfully disappointed, but there are 2 major flaws for such a simple game : first, the font is awful (good luck seeing the difference in the heat of the moment between limb and lime, or hero and kerb, for example), and for a typing game, that's just unacceptable.

Second, from time to time, the game stops responding to keyboard input. At first, I thought it was because of CAPS LOCKS (which does stop the game from recognizing what you're typing), but it also happened at least once for no reason.

To sum up : a typing game where you can't recognize immediately some of the words to type, and which will ignore your typing from time to time. Is it possible to miss the mark more than that ? I'm not sure ... Oh and unclear achievements too, probably linked to how many letters you typed, but since they' re not labeled, they could all the same be random.

EDIT : figured the achievements. You get one each time you play a game and score at least one word, for each of the 3 levels of difficulty. To say it otherwise, it's actually easier to get achievements on Hard than on Easy, since you die faster ... kk, "perfected" and uninstalled.