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Rocket Pac Man!

  • Kylaila
  • 10/08/2015 01:35 PM
  • 1446 views
Project Cell is a fairly short pac-man esque game. It is simple, intuitive but very fast-paced and offers enough variations and additions to keep it interesting.
It is tagged complete but seems to be still under development as there seem to be only half of the intended stages available yet.

You pick up colored balls while you avoid purple and yellow flamish monsters, to me they look more like dark fireballs with the background, but the main graphics are some kind of pincery monsters. Let's call them firepincer to make it needlessly complicated.

Starting the game, you end up in a playable stage selection - you enter a dot, you enter a stage. You beat or lose the stage, you return to this screen. It is fairly bland and practical. I would the stages to be perhaps in better focus, as the lower half of the screen is only black.
Sadly, finishing the stage gives you no visable result, I would love for the dots to change color upon completion. Now with any lack of change in available stages and completion mark, there are no save files, nor would your "progress" change anything about the game. There is no menu, so you will have to shut the game down separately.
There is also a typo when you lose the stage, as you get "cought" instead of "caught".


Nice 'n clean

The whole game has a very clean and intuitive, demonstrated perfectly by the graphics. They are very clean, easy to navigate in, and easy on the eye despite the fairly bright colors used (with one exception).
The contrast between background and collectibles as well as enemies makes it easy to navigate in.
Which I am not quite sure about is the rocket you maneveur - you can beat the first stages just fine without any speed boost, but holding shift accelerates you greatly just as you are used to sprinting. It seems the stages are purposefully made so that you discover only later on, as ghosts do speed up as well and would later be impossible to avoid.
What this means is you have a very fast-paced race - it is less about finding a good or ideal path than it is to react quickly to your surroundings. However, it also means that you can easily collide with flamepincers by accident as you are very very fast. This speed is also a little bit hard on the eyes after a while, as the screen is moving just as quickly. I'm not quite sure whether this speed can be adjusted so it is no longer hard on the eyes, but it would be neat if it was the case.
The sprint being a little closer to the usual would also enable using both in unison to sacrifice speed for accuracy .. as it is, you will always want speed.
Another way to enable this would be moving at least two tiles with the boost, so you are unable to navigate precisely if it .. but with how far the game progressed, this may throw the balance off entirely.

For the easy premise of "pick stuff up!", there is a great build-up in difficulty and variety.
You start out by picking up colored balls. You then have flamepincers added to the mixture which render a loss on touch. You then have differently colored balls to pick up, which you can only pick up as long as the color of the symbol on top matches the color of the ball.

Which means you need to traverse the same stage multiple times in search of different colors. In one stage the color you can pick up changes after a certain time, in a later one it changes once you have picked up all balls of the first color. It is a fairly simple adjustment that makes you interact with the stage quite differently, as you cannot or cann pick up all balls in one go.

Then, there are two types of flamepincers - purple ones chase you individually and follow you, while orange/yellow ones stay on set paths and are added later. They work great in unison to make you consider not just moving quickly, but also the general layout of the map and their movement paths.

As the stages progress, laser barriers and white walls are added (both at once, strangely). Laser barriers appear and disappear, so you have to wait before you can go in or out when they are there to grill you. Trapped with a purple flamepincer, it can be fun.


THE LIGHT, IT'S HURTING ME!

White walls grill you if you run into them .. which I only noticed later on. This will happen by accident rather than anything else and are .. not really much of an obstacle. Yet they are really hard on the eyes in the stage they were introduced in, as they are both bright and wide (in contrast to the thin laser lines). I would consider removing them or fading them into more of a grey or otherwise adjusting them to be easier on the eyes.

Visually, it is very simple and stylish, as you can easily see.
There are no sounds and no music .. so nothing to judge.

It is a very decent and solid game so far, and I can only hope for more additions.
I would love to see some minor adjustments because being even minor headache inducing is a very strong setback to the overall quality it has.

Posts

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Damn! You like my game more then I do. Thanks man. This was only just an experiment. You got me motivated to make this into a complete and cheap game some day soon, as I have been thinking of going commercial.
BTW. Sprint wasn't part of the game at all. This is pretty much a project that I quit early in development and decided to call it an experiment. But lol, that is some great discovery of an accidental mechanic XD
You're welcome! Would be cool to see in action, to be certain.

And yes, I wondered whether it was meant to be used at all .. it really changes the dynamic, but in a fun way. Would possibly make an additional mode relying on quick reactions rather than seeking out good paths.
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