just watched full playthrough and... wow. That was... bad.

[deothor]

I'm big fan of Neverhood. I've played as a little kid and that thing pretty much singehandedly made me love video games. When i heard of Armikrog i was quite happy. Then negative/mixed reviews came and out of fear of spoilers i didn't watch the gameplay and after a while just ended up forgetting about the title. Today, 9 years after relase, i decided to check it out.

Turns out the negative reviews were quite right.
I'll list my issues with the game. This is just from playthrough. I havent seen (almost) any bugs, though.

1. My first pet peeve (which might not be an issue for others) is that Armikrog uses other elements than clay. That's just... No. Seeing realistic things plastered onto screen was breaking my clay-immersion.
2. The story is awful. No other way to put it. The root-elevators feeding us alien-speech story seems like this has happened long time ago... But we found a baby.. Is baby immortal and gathered dust on the floor? Did the "bad guy" just waited patiently for years to start his scheme to extract babys' power? Or was it one huge "player is thrown right as the story starts"? Whichever option you choose, it's bad and flows like extra sour milk.
3. Talking Clayman. Either he talks and provides usefull information, or just remove his ability to talk. One or the other.
4. Dog. A talking dog in fact. This addition of a companion is wholly, 100% useless. Almost all of the the puzzle pieces could have been inserted in main path of Clayman. It's just badly underused padding. His ability to partake in puzzle solving by pressing on buttons is pointless. I'm not saying a companion is bad, but... Either make him cute (& mute) & useless, or actually bother to make puzzles around the duet.
5. The wall-cars. I am flabbergasted devs didn't adress the floaty, BAD, TERRIBLE point&click of those things. This isn't a "wink-wink" "tee-hee" reference to Neverhood. You don't reference annoying buggy thing players hated. I've sen those cars choking on crossroads or movable-paths that were part of puzzles. Just awful.
6, The Baby. Or rather the forced "redo this lulaby puzzle".. seriously.. who came up with this.
7. Backtracking to the start.... TWICE. Ok for this alone someone should be slapped with a wet cold fish. Several times.
8. The Finale. What. A. Let. Down. We are introduced to a setting (3 borthers yadda yadda), talking clayman.. And when those 2 of them meet at finale and they don't even talk beyond generic "muahaha i am bad guy!" and "i will stop you" .. It's so.. underhwlming and bad. This is why you don't force the settings if you don't bother to do anything with it. This is why you don't let your clayman to speak, if in most important moment he doesn't say anything of value.
9. giga robot. Animation is cool (albeit takes 5 seconds or so).. But it's not made out of clay but more like a kid glues toy parts with barbie dolls head. I wince.
10. Lack of showing us the world. Beyond first cutscene and the window in the first room you see pretty much nothing of the outside.
11. Game is short. Shorter than Neverhood in fact. And if you remove backtracking... Sigh.

This game has so many issues piled over it that it's score only holds on the Neverhood nostalgia. Devs didn't have good story. Their lead came up with stupid ideas that didn;t mesh well. Obviously they didn't have funds for full game.

One positive thing i can mentuin, though: soundtract. That is great! Maybe developers should have let musicians do the game... :|

Neverhood wasn't perfect... But to make it actually worse on every aspect you have to try. Try really hard. And they bait with a sequel.. the nerve someone people have.

Game's like 10-12$ and it's not worth it. I wouldn't pick it up even if it was free.

[Asha]

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