Urk Reviews... The Pumpkin Warriors 11-Jan-15

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Urkelbot666
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Urk Reviews... The Pumpkin Warriors 11-Jan-15

Post by Urkelbot666 »

This is my first time doing a game review here, I will do my best :)

I picked a game I downloaded at random and decided to give it a shot. The game I got was The Pumpkin Warriors. I can tell this is very much a work in progress, so I will review accordingly.

First Impressions:
Initially I was pleased with the look of the game. The title screen, and starting portrait graphics were nice. The main character's portrait has a fun cartoony style to it which I thought complemented the walkabout sprite graphic well.
The overworld, interior, and dungeon maps looked good. The color schemes work well with each other and there isn't much clashing. The doorways in the first dungeon were a bit hard to see at first, but once I knew what I was looking for, it was fine.
The NPCs were pretty nice to look at, and I especially like the upright anthropomorphic frogs. The blobster walkabouts were alright, and got across the pint of what they looked like.
I was a little disappointed by the in battle enemy graphics. From the look of everything else, I was expecting some fun looking monsters. The Blobsters are tiny, and I found it very difficult to figure out what I was looking at. The Walksticks look pretty good, but the mini-dinosaur enemies suffer from the same problem as the blobsters, too much detail in too little a space.

Gameplay

The game has some jarring screen jumps which lead to exposition text boxes, I think some fade ins would help a little. That said, the screen that popped up to tell me about the wicked blobsters was very nice looking, in line with the fun cartoon style of the rest of the game!

I often found myself getting unexpectedly jumped by enemies. The first enemy encounter of the game happens almost instantly after you step out of your house, and the enemies can gang up on you while you're talking to folks.

Perhaps using avoidance zones, or implementing a command to stop NPC movement while the text boxes are up might help with that.

The battling was pretty rough at first. As I mentioned the first enemy encounter came as a surprise, and I initially tried to beat them. I was battered and died pretty easily, from then, I learned to use the flee option more often. But the battling seems to even out pretty quickly once the party grows, and folks start gaining levels. By the end of my short playing, battles were pretty well balanced.

The dialogue in the game is in line with its look. Lots of silly exchanges, lend the game an Earthbound feel (a comparison which is hard to avoid with the current music) and makes things feel light and inconsequential in the beginning. This may lead future events to have a greater sense of gravity, or dread (not sure where the story is going yet)

The game seems to be moving quite fast, and I was wondering how long the finished product is intended to be.
In Closing
So far, it feels like it will become a fun little game. As it is now, It feels very sparse, but has a sense that it will become a more engaging and interesting world.
I would say that the story and gameplay are fairly standard, and feel secondary to the lovely graphics of the maps, and hero NPCs (Frogsuits!)
I would recommend folks to give this a shot if they haven't yet. I got some fun out of it in its current state, and I'll be sure to check it out as it progresses and nears completion.

(I think I got about as far as one can in the game after a little over an hour, but I may be missing some stuff)
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Froginator
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Post by Froginator »

Thanks for the awesome review, Urkelbot!
I'm very happy to have some critiques to work with and I'm absolutely going to change things such as the enemy-battle sprites or fading effects between the screens.
I actually had some other battle sprites but they looked a bit... odd.
But I'll do my best to change them.
Also, as I let some of my friends walk trough the game, I noticed the same problem that you've mentioned above ( the one with the enemys ganging up whilst talking to NPCs) too. So this will be the next thing I'm gonig to update.
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Urkelbot666
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Post by Urkelbot666 »

Froginator wrote:Thanks for the awesome review, Urkelbot!
I'm very happy to have some critiques to work with and I'm absolutely going to change things such as the enemy-battle sprites or fading effects between the screens.
I actually had some other battle sprites but they looked a bit... odd.
But I'll do my best to change them.
Also, as I let some of my friends walk trough the game, I noticed the same problem that you've mentioned above ( the one with the enemys ganging up whilst talking to NPCs) too. So this will be the next thing I'm gonig to update.
Cool, it's a fun little game :)
I've been working on one myself that does that Earthbound style enemy encounter. While testing it if I took too long with a text box, I got surrounded by like, 6 enemies! hahaha
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Froginator
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Post by Froginator »

So in case you wondered how long the game would be, it will have more than 10 dungeons and about 10 worlds in between the dungeons... so that will take a while :D
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