From the creators of the award-winning AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, grab the playable Kick It pre-release, and get the full game when it comes out! Battle your favorite drum 'n' bass tracks, or zen out as you soar through that trance album.
I'm calling it. I can't finish the 10 hours for this game. I feel strange having this game be my first review on the blog, because it's not a good game. It is, in truth, just barely a game at all. That fact is acknowledged throughout the menus, telling you how it's a prototype, this game mode is experimental, so on and so forth. So again, I feel strange. It doesn't quite seem right to excoriate a game that's just barely rubbing two sticks together.
But I said I would review it, so here I go. The overall gameplay is similar to Audiosurf - you input an mp3 you have in your library and it formulates a game level around that music algorithmically. Except Audiosurf lets you pick music from wherever instead of moving it into a subfolder in the game. And Audiosurf has different modes that actually make sense and differ greatly in approach and execution. And Audiosurf doesn't have an abortion of a user interface. Audiosurf lets you pause and resume. Are you getting the picture? Audiosurf is a much better game.
The gameplay basically boils down to "kissing" the objects that you're flying past - that is, moving close to them without hitting them - and picking up score items. The "learn" section of the godawful menu alludes to enemies you have to shoot and having to rotate the score plates to match a certain direction. As far as I can tell, that never actually occurs in the game. I played the four "cities", tweaked the settings, and never found anything other than the same repetitive, awful gameplay.
The 3 hours I spent on this game were painful. It felt like work trying to put together the willpower to finish the requirements of the challenge. So I didn't. Maybe it's weak sauce to bow out of the very first game in the challenge, but I couldn't do it. How bad was it? At one point I muted my computer and started listening to an audiobook as I desperately tried to rack up enough time to delete this from my library and consciousness. That's right kids, it was so bad that I muted a music game.
I looked into it, and this game is definitely a result of me buying the Potato Sack (that weird ARG tie-in for the launch of Portal 2). I just barely participated in it at the time, and it might be just as well. If the other games in this bundle are as incomplete as Kick It, it's going to be a long slog through my library indeed.
Thank God I got this as part of a bundle, because $9.99 for this half-conceived and quarter-delivered game is ludicrous - it isn't worth a tenth of that. It may be a pre-release prototype, and maybe the full game will be something worth talking about. This is not.
Score: 1/5
(As a post-script, the pre-release version came out in April 2011, now 20 months ago.)Next game (from the same developer): AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. That's the actual title. Goddammit.
Steam Store Link
Current Price: $9.99
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