Recent reviews by Hannah Z.

Obama is a relatively short indie game with an interesting set up and atmosphere. There is potential, but it isn't really fully realized. The overall design of the world and controls of the main character are good. The grapple isn't really a grapple but lets you move quickly in a way that feels good (although the FOV effect is kind of extreme) and the ability to railgun away enemy shields and then move in for a melee attack to take off their life bar is a good mechanic. When it lands it feels pretty good.

The bullet hell looks like the game is very difficult, but it's not. Just run around in circles and you dodge everything. I didn't have a second to take my eyes off what was going on, but I think there was some auto-regen of health going on if you don't get hit for a while, so even the long fights are endurable - you have the tools to get through them.

However, the main problem is that, like, 75% of the game is super dark. And not thematically. I mean not enough light. Pitch black. Ill-lit. Doom 3 without a flashlight. You can *kind of* shoot the railgun to get a sense of how far away walls are, but it doesn't work that well. Well over half the criticism one might have after finishing the game wouldn't be there if the game simply let you see what was going on. For example there's a super long cave you need to walk through to progress, but if you follow it to the end you just hit a dead end. You need to find some tiny hole to actually proceed. By sheer luck I found it, blasting away with the railgun to see if I could find anything, but it was needlessly difficult.

The other problem is that the game doesn't indicate well how to defeat bosses. You laser away their shield and then slice them with your sword. But the UI doesn't clearly show that the boss has a shield and doesn't tell you when its gone. The HP bars are needlessly noisy and obscure what would be useful to know. It would be way better if they were just solid color rectangles, and if the boss bar had, like, a red bar for HP and a blue bar for Shield, and when the blue bar depleted you knew you could close distance for the slice. It would make everything very self explanatory, but it isn't there.

I would have liked it if there was more narrative to put everything in context. There's something going on but it's not forthcoming. It calls areas funny fantasy names like Dark Souls when you walk into them, but the game doesn't justify the naming. It helps to space out each area, and the game would be worse without the names, but without the narrative it's just flavor text.

Overall I'd still recommend playing it, because it's short and kind of interesting and the bosses are neat. I would have liked it better if the darkness and UI were fixed and there was more narrative. It's a recommend because its a game you want more from. A game to not recommend would be one you aren't interested in anything more from. And this game is something I wanted more from.