0RBITALIS Review
Fun fact of the day: writing reviews can be difficult. First, you need to play the game to experience what it has to offer. Weigh up its strengths and weaknesses before putting these thoughts into a numerical value for people to easily understand. Then you expand upon these thoughts in the main bulk of the review, the article. But you have to try to keep it interesting, so you throw unique spins on these, poking fun here and there while hoping the developers can take a joke. Good games are fun to review since you can sing its praises, reliving all the good things it did. Bad games can also be fun, allowing you to think of inventive ways to warn others not to play it. But then there are the worst kind of game. The alright game. The “average at best” sort. These titles aren’t good enough to praise but are competent enough to escape the wrath of the review. Because of this, these are difficult to talk about and analyze. That is 0RBITALIS in a nutshell.
Look good? Get used to it, you’ll be seeing that a lot.
To put it another way, 0RBITALIS is the quiet kid in the back of the class. He kept himself to himself, did the work but never interacted with anyone else. If anyone tried to pick on him, you’d tell them to stop since he hadn’t done anything to anyone else, but at the same time you wouldn’t invite him to any parties either. Even as I write this, I’m actively looking for distractions from writing since there really isn’t much to say about it.
Let’s start with the basics. 0RBITALIS is a 2D puzzle game. The player is in charge of a small dot that is orbiting a red star. Other asteroids are orbiting this star too. It’s the player’s job to survive for an unspecified amount of time (it varies each level) until your dot inevitably crashes and blinks out of existence. Once you die, you’ll be taken to a leader board to see how many other countless other attempts of survival there were, and how long they lived. As the game goes on, the player must stop using the red sun as an orbit point, and start using the smaller asteroids scattered around them.
There is no plot in 0RBITALIS, which usually gives me an opportunity to create an absurd devised plot. But 0RBITALIS gives me nothing to work with. Because death is an inevitability in every stage, there’s no suitable story. Are these suicidal astronauts? It would have been better if there was an obvious end goal like a crystal, or after the stage is cleared the dot (which I assume is a satellite or a spaceship) teleports away to the next stage. Then I could have talked about how these people were looking for a suitable asteroid to mine or something. But no, 0RBITALIS can’t even give me that.
The audio is passable. Quiet chimes play in the background, not actually drawing the player’s attention. There’s no voice acting and barely any sound effects at all, asides from the quiet sound of your dot launching and crashing. It’s minimalist.
0RBITALIS’ level editor. £6.99 worth of innovation there folks!
In fact, minimalist would be the word to describe 0RBITALIS as a whole. The graphics certainly aren’t the focus, and while they convey what they need to, the game isn’t particularly good looking (Side note: Also, 0RBITALIS is strangely laggy, with constant frame drops and freezes. Personally, I expect this from games with more than two dimensions, but each to their own). Upon further research, I discovered why 0RBITALIS felt like a Flash game. It’s because it was a Flash game. Made in 48 hours for a competition. Honestly, this is pretty good work for a game to be made from the ground up in two days. I checked out the free version, and asides from a couple of user interface changes, I didn’t see any difference. At all. Maybe I’m blind, and someone could make a list as long as their arm all about the minor tweaks, but I see no difference. This really did shock me. I looked at another game I used to play back before I had financial independence- Canabalt.
This was a simple running game where players had to survive for as long as possible. Jumping was the only thing you could do. This too was minimalistic and began its life as a Flash game. But here’s the difference between the two: Canabalt makes all the differences apparent right off the bat. Upgraded graphics, graphics options, new runners and new missions. And while it’s all under the same package as before, these changes can make the game interesting again, which is surprising for a game that only uses one button. 0RBITALIS doesn’t do this. But the biggest difference is the price. Canabalt, fun and frantic with lots of new features made available right from the get-go: £1.99. 0RBITALIS, slow and somewhat boring, with “new elements” I’ve yet to see: £6.99!
Finding this out has done to me what Commando Jack did all those months ago, which is retroactively taint my experience with the game. Knowing this shady practice of re-spraying a rusty, broken car and calling it new disgusts me. The game could have been the most amount of fun I’ve ever had, but if they haven’t made any significant advances between the free and paid releases, then they should be called up on it and be made to explain themselves. Alan Zucconi, I’m calling you out. What exactly have you done to 0RBITALIS to make it worth the asking price? The Binding of Isaac is in the same boat as you. Made their name on Newgrounds, got sold on Steam, currently priced at £3.99. Sure they’re on different platforms and released a questionable sequel that probably could have been DLC, but people can still pick up the original for less than 0RBITALIS. Don’t make people pay for something they could easily get for free.
For me, 0RBITALIS has gone from a small but inoffensive game to a representation of why the gaming industry isn’t as great as it could be. The last thing an indie developer wants to do is release a game with (let’s be honest here) a price disproportionate to the product itself. If you need to play 0RBITALIS, for whatever reason, you can play the free version here. You aren’t missing out on anything, unless menus are your thing.
The post 0RBITALIS Review appeared first on MOUSE n JOYPAD.