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Nothing new, below-average implementation.

No Manatees Promised is a collection of 4 minigames. They are: "Bring your mate back home", "Fly-fish Feast", "A-maze-ing escape", and "Discover the ninja fish". This review will be an analysis of all four minigames.

But first, a comment on the intro: the intro was funny, and the art for it was excellent. Unfortunately, these will probably be the best aspect of the game itself: humor and art. The gameplay is sadly lacking.

Bring your mate back home

You start at the bottom which I did not expect. The red box is your destination.

The game is simple enough: guide your fish through the swarms of evil fish to reach the fish on the other end. Then it disappears completely,and you have to return to your starting area.

It's like frogger, except underwater essentially.

Unlike frogger, however, there are some unpleasant glitches. The hit-boxes on the middle fish are gigantic. They can not even be touching you and you fail the stage, which you might recognize as "really not fun".

2/5
Fly-fish feast

Better hope for some luck or you'll be floundering around.

In this minigame, you control a red blob (or at least that's what it looks like for me) whose mission is to catch fish who come out of the water. The fish rise for a time, reach a point, go left/right, then drop back down into the water.

There are several problems with this minigame.
1) As the screenshot details, you don't know when the fish is going to begin the "horizontal" phase. Did I mention this fish is nearly as fast as you are? It's very difficult to catch if you miss it once.
2) Tiny hit boxes. This is almost the opposite problem of minigame one. You need to get right on this fish for it to count.
3) Fish don't go away when they're eaten. If you catch up with one, you can just sit on top of it and catch fish over and over. This bug makes the minigame very easy if you know the trick, especially if you get 2+ on the same spot

Problem #1 is the big one. Lack of any indicator really kills this minigame.

2/5
A-maze-ing escape

Can you see anything in this picture?

This game is the best of the set. You collect keys, go through doors, and avoid fish while under a timer to reach the end of the stage.

There are still serious problems here though. For example, the visibility. Your fish moves very, very quickly in this and you can only see a few inches ahead of yourself. You can probably see what this causes.

If a fish is coming near your destination at the same time while you're holding up, you just won't have time to stop. You also can't be cautious: you're timed. You have to know the fish locations before trying it, or you'll rush into one, like I did.

This game is, like the others, very short and really only good to be played once.
3/5
Discover the Ninja Fish

Apparently ninja fish love hiding behind algae.

My first impression when I played this was: "what do I do?"
No instructions were given; it was showing me 3 fish. Eventually I pressed enter, and a while later figured out that I was supposed to identify the one that was NOT in the first number of fish they showed.

One very annoying thing is that when you identify one wrong, you have to do the previous level over again. The levels don't actually change (besides fish location), so it's just a big time-waster.

Then, the last stage took me multiple minutes, even taking a screenshot of the first fish because I couldn't see the two behind the algae. Eventually I guessed one of those and got it right.

This minigame isn't that creative or fun, and this gets the biggest thumbs-down from me. The art actually hurts the gameplay here.
1/5.

Conclusion
This game has too many glitches and design flaws to be good. The art is truly exceptional, and it feels bad to give it such a bad score. There's also one other flaw: gameplay time.

I'm okay with short games, but this is a 5-minute game if you play it correctly. This seems a little short. There's next to no replay value as it doesn't even keep track of your highscores as far as I can tell.

Minigame score average: 8/10 + 2 for art
Overall score: 10/20 (2.5/5)

Posts

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Hm, well, what can I say. The game is a bit of a rush-job. I didn't have the full month to make the game for the contest that I initially wanted (the initial plan was to make a very different game). I pretty much put most of the time on style, and less on substance, tee-hee.

I appreciate the review, and while I probably won't be making any major changes to the game since I'm lazy and this game was just a experiment anyway, it always helps for the future.
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