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Press Up To Win

  • Red_Nova
  • 04/18/2018 07:36 PM
  • 1398 views
I've found that there was a general rule your love-letter game must follow to stand out on its own merit rather than be a shameless knock-off: If you borrow the concept, but remove a core component, you need to replace it with something else. The Ranch borrowed the survival-horror concept from classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, took away the combat options, but left nothing but an empty void.

Not that I'm implying that The Ranch is a lazy knock off of survival-horror games. One look at any screenshot will tell you that InfectionFiles had put some real effort into making a striking impression that you won't see from most RPG Maker horror games. To make the story of this game's development even more interesting, The Ranch was made for the Retromania event, and therefore was developed in a time frame of a mere five days! The fact that it came out at all is already is pretty commendable, never mind playable.

Unfortunately, it seems five days wasn't enough time to fully realize the potential, and a neat presentation hides a monotonous, underdeveloped horror RPG that left me about as empty as the brains of the monsters I fought.

So the game starts and I'm greeted with a short text into explaining the situation. The Ranch is the story of an unnamed man returning from an unspecified location to find aliens and monsters attacking his family ranch. It's short and dry, but I chalk that up to being inspired by the minimalistic storytelling from games of old. Still, the sudden perspective switch between third person to second person colored my first impression as the game's writing being simply poor rather than deliberately minimalistic.

A random perspective change is not that big of a deal considering that handful of sentences in the intro is the only real cutscene in the game, so I won't harp on it too much. However, while I don't expect every game to have a gripping tale, I do expect some consistency in what little writing there is. Depending on the story's perspective, the presentation could have been handled in a number of ways. Why not have the intro read in the main character's voice? Something other than the dry, uninspired context dump. Besides, how did he know the place was overrun before arriving at the ranch himself? Having the character react to a first sighting would have been far more interesting to see, and would make the main character slightly more relatable.



Am not alien. Am human with human emotions and human ties.


Side note: The stilted writing could've worked in the game's favor with a twist that they were actually aliens in disguise. I won't spoil it for you, but it would have made the real ending much more interesting.

Again, story is not what The Ranch cares about, and that's fine by me. A simple change in the first sentence: "A man returns to the family ranch," to "You return to your family's ranch," is all that's needed to immediately establish the perspective and expectations for story-nuts like myself.


Whatever, though. Story Shmory. Clearly, this wasn't going to be focusing on plot, and that's fine! It's a callback to retro games, so as long as you have proper context, you don't need a complex rollar coaster of an epic tale. What you DO need is interesting gameplay, though, and a quick glance at the title of this review should tell you what I think about it.

Combat takes place in the field, and fighting enemies involves holding the forward button to walk into them and trade blows until whoever loses their HP first drops dead. It's the MMO approach to fighting, minus the skills, friends, and everything else that makes that style fun. As I was playing, I was anticipating some kind of upgrade to my character beyond just a health increase from leveling up, like new skills, equipment, or anything to give a feeling of progression, but my hopes were dashed by the time the credits rolled. I walked away from the game feeling rather silly that I wasted my early game time and resources fighting enemies for EXP.

Yep, the RPG part of this game is leveling up from earning EXP by beating enemies and completing sidequests. All level ups do, however, is increase your health and AP pool you use for attacks. In theory, AP was implemented to prevent players from fighting too much and focus on survival instead of brawling. In reality, however, I never even came close to running low, as the healing items you get restore both HP and AP. As far as I could tell, enemies do the same amount of damage to me, and I only slightly increased my damage output. I was around level 4 when the game concluded, and basic enemies died in 3 hits instead of two. Go me.

So hold the up button on enough enemies to level up so you can hold the up button against enemies that require you to hold the up button slightly longer. If you want to push the argument that this was another homage to the simplicity of retro-style games, that's fair enough. However, deliberately boring is still boring, and I began avoiding enemies not out of a need for resource management (initially, at least), but out of sheer disinterest.

To The Ranch's credit, however, most of your attention will be spent on how you actoutside of combat instead of in it. Taking cues from classic survival horror games like old school Resident Evil and Silent Hill, killing every enemy you see will leave you sorely lacking in healing resources mid to late game. Without any healing abilities, health fountains, or even HP restoration upon leveling up, your only means to regain lost health is by scouring the map and finding healing items. Even then, you'll need about two or three of them to restore any substantial part of your health.

However, unlike the aforementioned survival horror games, you need to dispatch enemies in order to gain EXP to level up. In addition, there will be more than one instance where the game requires you to kill a set number of enemies before you are allowed to move on. This means that you must keep a constant balancing act of gaining EXP to endure harder-hitting foes and keeping your resources from depleting. Don't worry, it's not nearly as hard as it sounds. As long as you do some of the optional quests, you'll have enough EXP to beat the game.

There lies my biggest problem with The Ranch. The need for EXP forces you to engage in the mindless combat you wouldn't bother with otherwise. The complete lack of strategy or options other than engage or retreat doesn't lend itself well to the MMO battle formula, and a slight boost to your health doesn't give a strong feeling of empowerment. Enemies are not a threat, but a minor annoyance that temporarily halts your progression.


It also doesn't help that the progress tracker doesn't work. The quests all function as intended, but you can't keep track of how far along you are.


The Ranch emphasizes exploration outside of combat. Therefore, upgrades to the character should've been given as rewards for exploration, not from combat. Health should have been increased by finding health up items. There could also be equipment to increase damage given and reduce damage taken, consumable items that deal a large amount of damage to reduce the need for the tedious combat, strong enemies that you can't immediately beat and need to scour the area for upgrades or items to make the fight possible. Any or all of these options would have given the combat an interesting edge and an incentive for players to both fight and explore. As it is, the need for EXP forces players to endure the boring combat, crippling any sense of enjoyment I could have had otherwise.

The linear level design also works against the exploration-based mechanics. With 5 levels in total, each one having a main objective you must complete before moving on, you'll be constantly moving forward with sparse "puzzles" such as finding a key to a door, to slow your forward momentum. This could have been fixed by taking the three most visually distinct levels (as most of them look the same) and connecting them to allow players to explore at their own pace. That would allow the freedom to have tough enemies blocking core progression in certain rooms until players collect enough supplies to take them down elsewhere, and keys in different areas of different maps.

I understand that this was made in a mere 5 days, and the fact that it came out at all, never mind being relatively bug-free (I didn't see any in my playthrough) is certainly worth praise. However, the amount of effort that went into the UI and quest system leads me to believe that most of these mechanics I critiqued were deliberate design decisions, and not casualties of time crunch. EXP does not jive well with this style of gameplay, and should not have been included to begin with.

Even with a 30 minute runtime, I still find it difficult to recommend this to anyone looking for a good zombie survival game to play. The novelty of the 3D exploration wears out halfway around level 1, and the monotonous combat makes those 30 minutes feel like an hour. Rather than a survival-horror love letter, The Ranch feels like a linear arcade shooter without the shooting.

Posts

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InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
Thank you for the review! While I think it was a bit harsh considering it was made for an event and the time constraints. It was basically mashing together resources I own, using the Explorer's HUD script and the faux 3D script to make something more along the lines of a old maze game with a little extra.

It was made to be very basic and not much beyond that. This is a project I want to touch in the future but until then it is what it is.

I honestly feel you looked into most of it too much and maybe judged on that basis.

Don't get me wrong, because I do appreciate the in depth insight and will take notes for if/when I come back to this project. Because a lot of what you said is what I feel for a serious project. I'm sorry this wasn't a bigger development. The fact is this was made in under a week and wasn't sharp as a diamond.

Thank you for the review and for the fun bet! We will have to do it again sometime :)

edit: So, you would suggest getting rid of Experience altogether? Because that would be fine with me! And I'm probably gonna add more to this or in a new comment soon because there is a lot I want to address and make right! :)
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
The question of whether the score was too harsh or not was definitely in the front of my mind as I was writing the review! While I'm very willing to admit that I may have look into most of these aspects too deeply, the EXP and the design around it really did kill the experience for me.

So yeah, I agree that experience in general should be axed and reward players with gear and items for completing side quests instead.

The lack of size of the game wasn't really what bothered me. In fact, I'd go so far as to say there were some elements that may have had TOO much time put into it, namely the levels. Since three levels in the game looked about the same, I thought about what the game would have been like if you only made three levels and spend all that extra time polishing up the systems. For such a short dev time, I think it'd be better to have fewer rooms with more polished gameplay than vice versa.
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