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Sacred Reviews: Soliquity

Intro

"Soliquity" is a puzzle game developed by sal using ika that was created for the Game Chill 2009. An event where developers were tasked with creating a game where the players can play as both sides of a conflict. And in this game it appears that solids and liquids have gone to war. Though the exact details to why have been lost to the sands of time. As such, I really can't give you a narrative reason for why anything is happening in this game. So, I'll just bypass that section and start talking about the gameplay.

Gameplay

As previously mentioned the game allows you to play as both sides of this conflict. If your playing as the solids your goal is to prevent the liquids from reach a certain point or points on the map for a set amount of enemy liquid. If your playing as the liquid side your aiming to do the opposite. Unfortunately both sides of this equation are boring to play as.

In the case of the solids you only need to lock one or two gates at the right time in order to win.



So the bulk of your time is spent waiting on the liquid to either reach certain gates or for the liquid to just run out of steam. And while the game presents solids with the challenge of protecting two points on the third stage. Your only required to keep one safe. So it's even easier on that map to win since you can focus your guarding efforts on a single point while liquid is forced to take both in order to win.

The liquid side is even worse in my opinion in terms of being boring since the AI for the solids is really bad.



As a result you only need to turn on one faucet and wait in order to win on every single map. Jeez, you'd think the AI would at least close off gates if it can if the water is getting close to a gate, but it just ignores them in favor of the block closest to the active faucet.

At any rate the action on display here is truly the stuff of legends. Sadly it gets even worse since you can close and open gates multiple times as the solids to make things a bit more interesting, but if you do this there is a decent chance the game will become unstable and crash when you try and load the third stage. And this error will continue until you switch sides. At least that managed to fix it for me.

Graphics

The graphics are very basic with most of the objects on display being comprised of square tiles. As such there really isn't any eye candy in this project. So if your looking for something visually appealing I'd look elsewhere. The only nice thing I can say about the visuals is that they are functional for what the game is trying to get across.

Sound

The only notice aspect about the background music and sound effects in this game is that they don't exist. As such, I really can't offer any deep insights into them beyond the lack of background music making this boring game come across as even more dull.

Conclusion

"Soliquidity" is a boring little puzzle game that can be conquered in around five minutes. And those minutes would be better used on playing another game in my opinion since this puzzle game really won't test your puzzle solving skills. As such the only people that should play this game are those hoping to exploit it for some makerscore by submitting a review or "Let's Play" for what little is there.