BattleBlock Theater

[melmer]

This game is out today

http://www.battleblocktheater.com/game/

 

Review:

http://www.gamesradar.com/battleblock-theater-review/

 

[I_smell]

Man they announced a release date about a week before! That was crazy!

 

I played this for a while at GDC :smug: and I LOVE the Newgrounds guys, with all my heart, I love Castle Crashers, Alien Hominid is a great thing, these guys are super fun, I respect that this game took a big long time... but it didn't seem very good at all.

 

Y'know when Weatley gets the power to make test chambers and he kind of throws puzzle pieces around willy nilly? Y'know when you give a level editor out to a community and they splash out levels with all spikes, or all jump-pads, or they make a crazy maze out of ramps and write their name in cars and stuff? ...this game felt like that. I bounced along a row of jump pads, a boat went through a maze of teleporter-blocks before it got to me, there was a hundred mines in a row for no good gameplay reason, and a lot of funny tricks I was making in my own game after I'd ran out of ideas.

Levels weren't interestingly designed, like in Super Meat Boy, they all just seemed like a hundred different-coloured tiles in some imporvised level design, it was really worrying.

 

But hey I only played an early section, for about half an hour, so everyone else get stuck in and say what you think instead.

OH-- and note they had one fucking controller at this thing, so yeah.

[syntheticgerbil]

Looks like this game didn't make a splash. I'm really not sure if that's deserved or not though.

 

The Steam version just came out last week and I was holding out on it, because I am not paying for a Gold account just for this game and keeping it running to collect their limited time hats. The good thing about it being on Steam is I can very casually pick up and play a little bit without totally distracting me from what I need to be doing on the PC.

 

Battleblock is very enjoyable when you get in to 2 players in up, it's one of those games where it's nice to just share the experience with friends. However I don't feel like many people are playing it since there seems to be hardly anyone online if at all when the game is heavily based on user participation. The actual game itself seems incredibly short at an eight world total, and I've already finished the first world. I guess it's double if you count the co-op versions, but they aren't completely different multiplayer levels ala Splosion Man. What The Behemoth seems to base their longevity on is the user involvement of level creation and the availability of players to play and rate new levels. I'm not particularly interested in playing story type user levels unless they super creative, but there's just not that kind of flexibility compared to Little Big Planet or something else more successful. However the user created arena levels are much more satisfying and pretty much guarantees you'll never get tired of the maps.

 

I don't know, the game is fun when I'm playing it, it is super polished, and I'm a sucker for platformers, but I feel a little confused that this game took years to develop and has very little content. I give less credence to the development time of a game made with tiles and characters without any unique abilities. Castle Crashers was short but it had a lot of original content, especially with unlockable characters and unique magic powers (although half of the characters had some kind of combination of other character magic).