This upload gets the honour of being the first one where I’ll be using my enhanced review system. It should provide longer reviews, yet save me a lot of work. A paradox, but it should work fairly well. Anyhow, here goes:
Visual Appeal – 2 out of 5
Uh well yeah. Take no offense on this, but I didn’t like the eyecandy at all. Firstly, it makes little to no sense that the background would be so terribly open while the level is supposed to be an underground depository? Also, a lot of the level was barren. Most of the walls seemed to be the same 2×2 block pasted over and over, which looked very dull and uninteresting. The layer 4 background weren’t all that good looking either, and most of the time the mournful background was gloriously exposed. Blargh. There was also some sparse layer 3 eyecandy, but most of the time it was either buggy: or it blocked 80% of my vision, causing me to bump into enemies. Overall, the level doesn’t have the scary atmosphere it was intended to have, and the lightning doesn’t help it, either.
Playability – 2 out of 5
This field was also below average. Most of the level involved searching for leaky radioactive barrels and blocking off access to them. Most of the barrels were placed on the main path of the level (why would a depository be so linear?), and thus it wasn’t as fun as it might have been. Also, the whole thing became boring after a while. Not sure why, but it might be a fault of the linearity. This level also was lacking in terms of hardness, it was mainly easy in most places. In some areas, however, there were vines placed just above the radioactive radius of the barrels, and I couldn’t avoid getting hurt there. There were some carrots on the way, so it wasn’t much of a problem in the long run, but still seemed unfair for me. And for a closing note, I wasn’t really happy with how there were little to no puzzles in the whole level.
Summary- The general idea was decent.
- The execution was lacking, honestly.
Overall
This level was pretty average. The story and the idea were good though, and they made me raise an eyebrow, as well as the overall rating. However, the level itself was quite a letdown… work on your levels a little more.