Jon "Pendelton"
Critique, Review Saturday, October 24th 2009

2 Comments

The Indie Games section of Xbox Live scares me. Never has there been a game marketplace filled with such vast amounts of crap. I’ve rarely played great games on there; I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1, Galax-e-mail, and A Fading Melody are pretty much it. NG was sent a review token for Elfland Reloaded Volume 1 by the developers Bog Turtle Games, which looked pretty unspectacular when I viewed the info and screenshots on XBLA.

Depending on your sexual preference, Elfland Reloaded Volume 1 is a simple platformer telling the story of Elfie or Elfita. The male/female elf is tasked with visiting the alchemist Gorgimer so that he can concoct a potion to stop some trolls from attacking an elven city. Equipped with paralysis-inducing berries and a sense of adventure, you’re left to venture out in search of the great wizard to help you out.

Hello, Majority of Indie Games

Enough of the formalities: This game is terrible. Awful, no-good, very bad, etc.

Gameplay is simple platforming that can get aggravating from time to time. Each and every platforming trope is here; clouds that act like platforms, floating platforms, platforms on rails that dip into water. Jumping is looser than [insert whorish woman here]’s vagina. To defeat any evil foes in your way, you can toss berries at them that paralyze them for roughly two minutes (if that). Berries come in three different flavors: simple red berries, big red spreadshot berries, and homing blueberries. There are gray bomb berries too, but they suck and only work as a demolition tool once in the game.

Enemies are taken straight from the pages of Generic Platformer Magazine. Gray and brown rats that scurry across the floor and are near impossible to hit. Cardinals that fly in a strange manner. Bats that swoop down from their perches in a drunken fashion, and randomly fly straight at you. Silver snakes, or whatever the fuck they are, that bounce at you. Green snakes that make me wonder why they had to put two kinds of snakes in the game. Purple critters that shriek in a way that will haunt my dreams for the rest of my days. It’s a host of enemies you’ve seen numerous times before in numerous games.

Now for the other stuff; the graphics look like crayons melted over old McKids sprites. The menus seem to have been designed for a web page from 1999. The music is one annoyingly upbeat song set on repeat through most of the game, the rest is a somewhat nicer low-key song.

Simple gameplay, ho-hum enemies, lame aesthetics; all of these come standard in bad Indie Games. What sets this game apart and makes it so heinous is what it does differently from your standard Indie Game.

A Step Below Mediocre

Upon starting a new file, the game warns you that it has no autosave feature. This wouldn’t be such a big problem if there were checkpoints at any point. But alas, there aren’t. You better be ready to start the game over if you’re absent-minded and forget to save before dying.

Not that starting the game over is a hassle; the game only last about an hour. Yep, at a cost of 240 MS space dollars you get an hour’s worth of gameplay. Even though this is the first of a series that doesn’t excuse the length. If you’re lucky  you might be able to get two hours out of this thing. But why would you even want to waste that much time and banana points on this mess?

The strangest part about the game might be its two strategy guides, “Hints” and “How to Play”, which come as part of the menu. While most guides have sections like “Items” and “Characters”, these guides have somewhat…stranger sections.

“Map” is a diagram of the nine screens you go through, with no pictures. It’s just a few letters  to denote what each screen is, written in the order of how you go through them. “About Elfland” is a section which literally has the words “Try bumping into various things and see what they do.” Pray nothing kills you. “Screen statistics” shows you what ammo and health icons on the HUD are, in case you forgot. “How to win” is literally a step-by-step walkthrough of the game. In case you get lost. In an hour-long game.

Why exactly would you have a list of tips if you have a section about how to win the game? I can’t believe that Bog Turtle Games, the company that made Galax-e-mail, created this bland hunk of a game.

A few other things worth mentioning

• One section of the game has you pay off a guard to get into Gorgimir’s castle. This is where you get to use jewels, an item found all around Elfland, but only put to use that one time. What a waste…
• Green potions in the game cause massive damage when touched. And nothing in the game world lets you know this.
• I’m actually happy the “How to Win” guide is in here. No one in the game tells you how to fight the final boss. This is great, especially since you have to know about the invisible weak spot on it to kill it.
• Water is a fiendish foe in the game. Under water? You’ll gain damage and drown. Touching water? You’ll gain damage and drown. Want to jump out of the water? No fucking chance, you’ll probably drown.

Once I was finished with this game I deleted it and never looked back. I sat through little more than an hour of blandness; a game encompassing everything bad you’ve heard about XBLIG platformers. Make sure you don’t do the same.

You should play this game if…

…you haven’t had enough generic and boring Indie Game platformers.

Final Score

Another dime-a-dozen platformer that is shockingly bad at some points and boring everywhere else

(What does this score mean?)