Beyond Reality (IGMC 2014 Edition)

Beyond Reality was one of the entries for the IGMC (Indie Game Making Contest) for 2014. As one of the judges for the RPG portion of the competition it is my pleasure to share my thoughts on the game. This review will basically just be the notes I took cleaned up. It will be based on the competition version of the game, so certain aspects of the game may have been changed.


Presentation
Mapping is well done with the visuals working well together to create a vivid world. It's a pity that the more interesting maps were skipped over, as they would have made a more engaging setting.

Technically, the writing was very sound and there were no issues in that aspect as far as I could see. The story, though, was a bit rushed and progression jumped quite quickly from place to place, which was a pity as it was interesting enough that time spent on it could have helped a lot. Characters were also interesting in their own way, though they seemed a little similar in some cases.

Default skills and items were used, to the detriment of the game, especially in contras to some of the skills that were brought in to play.

Gameplay
There were some systems that were odd - the smooth camera, for example, brought very little to the visual aspects and wasn't really warranted.

Battles were pretty basic with little originality or design to them, bar one skill that allowed for a combo between two characters. I would have liked to have seen more skills that were tailored to the characters instead of the default database ones. Knowing where they came from was really distracting from the flow of the game.

Enemies were easy enough to defeat, bar the last battle which was quite a jump in difficulty. If it had been built up a bit more over time the progress would have been better. That said, the boss battle was difficult but pretty fun.

There was no real interaction outside of battles bar a few chests with items and a small handful of NPCs to talk to. Overall there was one dungeon which was short and most battles could be avoided.

Some enemies were harder to avoid than others, but you could skip all of them if you were fast enough.

Fun factor
The story felt very rushed and jumped from one area to another without any real interaction or depth. It left a shallow feel to the overall gameplay and story.

Default skills and items made the battles less interesting than they could have been. The layout for battles was nice but the actual system was rather bland, bar the combo attack. More thought in that regard would have been nice.

There wasn't enough time to really take in the pretty visuals - two maps which were quite pretty were just used for 10 second cutscenes (complete with music changes which made the whole thing feel choppy and unconnected, leaving me puzzled and a little upset that I didn't get to look around).

Immersion was pretty low, sadly. I would have liked to have played more instead of watching. It was more like a movie you could play in a few select parts rather than a game.

Overall, the game had some issues in that it was too rushed and missing personality. While the visuals and writing were pretty good, the game lacked its own personality in some areas and could have done with allowing the player to explore the more interesting areas instead of brushing over them as filler.

For the IGMC I scored it a 43 out of 60. On RMN I give it a 3.5