ORCS

All right, ORCS. 5/20, and I recommend. I agree that this first sentence seems absurd. And yet, no mistake to see in there. It is a game of truly abysmal quality. And for an extravagant amount of reasons. So first, it's a ugliness that borders on beauty. We find ourselves faced with a masterpiece of the crappy pixel-art, it's big, the colors are little varied and of a questionable taste, it leaves no room to the smallest detail and, although the game remains readable, it can lead to some aberrations of gameplay. You will not need me to realize that we are facing an old sidescroller as the small studios like to come out sometimes. I have absolutely nothing against the approach, on the contrary, it sometimes gives some small nuggets (BroForce, rogue legacy) some of which bring in addition refreshing innovations (SuperMeatBoy). But tackling a genre as emblematic of the game-video excludes to let go to simplism. Yet I think we are touching the credo of the development team of this game: "Why go beyond what is bad?" ORCS is mediocrity to all the tables (which are an incredible number of 24): the design is bad, the story does not exist (despite a bold attempt to pass the surface of the gameplay for a fundamental quest: kill all the orcs), the mechanics are battered and beaten (jumping, typing, running, throwing), the situations encountered are often at the borders of the absurd, the music is nightmare and the game constantly oscillates between the child ease and the Homeric difficulty. This is for the quick theoretical presentation. In fact it gives this: the King of the orcs decides that it is good there are the human, we will eradicate them. A Knight bucolic who marvens when eating a potato realizes that orcs are eradicating humans and logically decides to eradicate orcs. So now we're starting to eradicate the Orcs. To do this, we use a sword and the weapons of our victims that we then throw to the mouths of future victims. This way we advance through repetitive tables by recovering our energy (very lean) at every transition. There's nothing really rocket-science in there, you say. And yet, you're going to tear your hair out. The game is terribly hard but only at times very well chosen by the team to be horribly frustrating. This is where the game stacks gaily all that the plateformers do worse: jumps that hide the enemies, biting traps that one-shoot just below jumps requiring watchmaker precision, unlikely combinations of enemies that make the absolutely inevitable attack sprites. In short, the icing on the icing on the cake cream of the annoying stuff that makes a game absolutely disgusting. Obviously to this comes to add everything that has been said before: we know that we do all this, so we can continue to do roughly the same in the following table, often meeting the same problems, in short... In fact, the game becomes as the player advances a sort of abusively punitive die and retry and to the lethating monotony. Nevertheless this allows to see the moments of deep interrogation follow. You'll wonder why you're playing this turt. Then, the music comes to repeat you in a loop its three notes of saturated synth, what to add aggressive sound effects and all this circus resumes with each respawn. It is only then that you begin to question the meaning of suffering and leisure. And then it's rehearsal. But the repetition of fragments far too short (each table ends in more or less a minute) and that's where the rub hurts. Never the real impression of advancing and especially never opening to another approach to gameplay. The mechanics are far too simple for a true creativity of the player to come into play (which is not the case in a good platform game or each player can express a style). If madness is to always do the same thing by expecting different results then to triumph over this game you will have no other solution than to go crazy. Well I get angry at the strength of writing on this filth and I would not spoil the surprise of the few brave who will confront this informed bidule. Ah, and for those who would wonder why I still recommend this fifth circle ersatz of hell, it is because all the same it is very affordable and a videogame experience which no one can decently come out unchanged.