✘ Bought for 10¢.
✘ Read all recent reviews and still decided to buy it, cause 10¢ reasons.
✘ Start game and quickly notice there is something 'off' about it.
✘ Music reminds me of The Vaudevillains from WWE, so quickly mute sound.
✘ Start level; Die immediately.
✘ Tried playing game several times.
✘ Changed from a girl with a machine gun(?) into a guy(?) with long hair and a green jacket.
✘ Didn't understand what was happening, so dead.
✘ Screen keeps moving and head feels like it's about to explode.
✘ Game will not close and still says I am playing in Steam although am not.
✘ Must force-close Steam to stop game. Every, Single. Time.


Not worth 10¢.
Avoid like plague.

This game is just broken. I click on Start and I am taken to a game over screen. Click on Restart and get the Game Over screen again. If I ever get to play the game I may change the review, but in its current state it is just a Game Over screen with bad music.

I'm extremely disappointed about the condition of this game. I realize that it's still in early access, but according to the news on the store page, full launch is expected by April 2016. It's because of this fact, and the posts indicating patches and updates that I decided that this was finally the time to take a look at it. I had really high hopes, even though I was expecting a minor glitch or two.

What I found instead was a game that I simply cannot play. Firstly, the game does not have full controller support, as indicated. At best, it's got partial support. I was unable to start the game, or even go to full-screen, without using the mouse. The menu didn't function correctly, and it appeared as if perhaps this was one of the features that had not yet been finished.

I began with the tutorial option, but it didn't work for me, so I decided to just try the play option. Again, I had to use the mouse to begin the game with "Book 1," and when the game did start, I experienced several difficulties and oddities.

Firstly, the screen would waver, like a mirror image or looking through water. I have no idea if this is intentional or because of a design issue, but it made it impossible for me to see my character and what I was doing. All the while, though, this side-scrolling platformer is continuing to move, so that resulted in "sudden death."

The next thing I noticed was a sudden slowing of animations and movement on the screen. This most often occurred for me while my character was in motion or in the air in mid-jump.

I attempted several times to finish the first level but couldn't, so I had the idea to see if I could go to "Book 2" without having actually finished "Book 1." It turned out that I could, though it's probably not a good thing that this was possible. Again turning to the mouse to launch the level, I made a few successful jumps, popped off a couple shots with my gun and noticed that the shots seemed to be moving much slower than they probably should. I figured that I could deal with that and just kept jumping, determined to play this game that I'd been anticipating.

This is when my screen started wavering yet again and then a very odd thing happened. I'd landed onto a lower building, but a split-second later, the building disappeared. My character remained stuck in an odd position in the middle of my screen, and everything just froze. I couldn't believe I was actually seeing what I was seeing, so I took a screen shot and then tried to restart the level.

Unfortunately, I was unable to use any of the controls or the mouse. I hit Alt+Tab and closed the game screen, but even that didn't work. Next, I tried to close Steam, but I kept getting an error message that Steam couldn't close because Guardians of Victoria was running. With no game screen to close, and no option to force quit, I had no choice but to reboot in order to regain control over my laptop.

I can't even express how disappointed I am. I love indie games, steampunk, and platformers, so I was truly excited about this game. I can see from some of the posts that the developer has had quite a struggle with this game, and I sympathize with that. Unfortunately, though, I really cannot recommend the game in it's current state. I will, however, invite the developer to reach out to me when the game is truly finished. At that point, I will absolutely give the game another try and revise my review.

If you load the game you get an award for waiting through the loading process as it takes so long.

If you can figure out how to start a level, you win the "starter" award for being able to navigate the bad graphics.

When you start the first level you can get an award for restarting (or respawning after dying) and watching the instructions 100 times.

If you jump over the first two red buildings and then fall off the blue building, you've gone as far as you can. You win the "fall to your death" award. If you do that with a friend...it's co-op!

That's where the game ends, so you should stop trying to go farther. You can't. I'll update with more achievements if I even launch the game again. It consumes any RAM from any computer within a 10 block radius of my house.

Actually, I won't relaunch. I only paid $0.22 for the game with a 90% off coupon, but I'm still going to request a refund. Never mind, I've had so much fun trashing this game that it was worth it. In case you haven't picked up on it, this game is terrible.

**edit** I am not eligable for a refund because even though I closed the game it...it didn't close. Now I'm over 2 hours of playtime. It keeps taking my RAM and recording game time for me. Now I can't get my $0.22 back. :(

I don't really like to bash games on here to this extent but after the experience I have just had trying to play the game I think people should know how it currently plays.

This game is *very* unfinished despite claiming to be on patch 1.3 at the moment. The menus have overlapping music tracks, the buttons take 5 or 6 attempts to click, when I finally got into the game the screen stretched in weird ways over itself before dumping me onto a screen in which I could only look left and right (Tried using all three sets of movement controls from the controls screen).

On my second attempt to play the game I was able to move! (I think jumping first set it off)

I have a video below of my second attempt at playing the game to back up my claims (Yes I know I'm not very good at it, I was mainly surprised that it let me move after the first time)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X63g8r8lCUY

There are parts of this game I like, and parts of it I don't like.

The parts I like are the music and the art. I'm not sure everyone will agree with me to this, but I find the art to be pretty unique and interesting, and the music complements that. Sometimes, I actually found that I was staring at a certain thing wondering ♥♥♥♥♥ and awfuqyeh. I guess that is kind of feeling steampunk games can give off.

However, the bad outweight the good in this game because the bad cause the game to be essentially not playable for me. First of all, this game runs so slowly, I swear its running on 5-10 fps. There is also no setting that I found to change the resolution, and it actually slows down the rest of my computer when I play it. The game is also filled with bugs that really got on my nerves.

I really wanted to enjoy this game, but the bugs and lack of user friendlyness really ruined the experience for me. If they fine tune it and get rid of the bad, I would recommend this game for some trippiness, especially if you are drunk or high.

Rating: 5.2/10
Recommend Price: $0.29 or below

Back in the days before the invention of the quantum holocube capacitor (that is, pre-2053) computers had limited random access memory. To cope with this, software engineers designed technologies such as "only loading levels when you enter them" and "not spawning four processes to play a 2d platformer". Thankfully, these constraints on a developer's artistic vision no longer apply. Now you can marvel at game over screens as soon as you start the tutorial. What an age we live in!

-- Sent from my iNeuroUplink

I'm actually writing this as a self-reflection, from a solo developer who made this as their first ever game and was entirely self-taught (down to the business aspects). I put a LOT of time, effort and love into this game. Making a game when you're new to the scene is extremely hard. I finished the game when homeless. I didn't try and sell it for anything other than cheap when it was done and haven't earnt anything off it in quite a while.

It's weird to see a developer put a review out for a game they made, but I no longer have a true affiliation with this project. Just go and check out Project Abyss or Spiritlands and see how far I came 2 games after this one. I don't recommend this game as it is not a good game haha. It just takes being out the loop, and 3 years experience to understand that.

I do have one comment for reviewers though. Physical threats, insults, claims or money grabbing... is not okay. No matter what you thought of what I made.

As of the time of this review, the game is EXTREMELLY slow (mostly due to the fact that it tries to eat all my RAM), and every input has a delay, so you're probably gonna die before your character does anything.

The objects of the scenary seem to be aesthetically disconnected, which makes the gameplay harder, as it can sometimes confuse you about the right path to follow.

It is not playable, as of now.

Good lord what have you done to my poor eyes.

The ugliest, most incoherent, broken, unplayable, glitchy, failed attempt at a game I've played in... well, hours, given I'm in the process of skimming through my library.

Looking more like an accident, Guardians of Victoria has the most visually painful presentation I've ever had the displeasure of laying eyes on. A third of the screen is taken up by rapidly-cycling hints while the level itself is covered in text boxes. Random pieces of mismatched art are jammed together without any indication of what's in the background and what's a platform, their sizes mismatched and their animation barely existing. Collision detection is all over the place, with most objects seeming to exist as large squares rather than what they actually look like.

Falling through the world or getting stuck are such common problems they make the levels almost impossible to actually complete. Even if you don't make any mistakes with the sluggish, unresponsive platforming, the game goes right ahead and kills you with a bug, sending you all the way back to the beginning. My patience didn't last long, but I'm pretty sure this game would actually prove impossible to beat if you really tried.

As an added bonus feature, it does not properly terminate when you quit and invisibly hides out in the background somewhere eating up a bizarrely large amount of RAM. So, not just unplayable, but actively malicious towards your computer.

It's the kind of mess that makes you step back and wonder, how the hell does this even HAPPEN? Was this made by a human being, or is it the first attempt at an automatic game-creation artificial intelligence gone horribly wrong?