Recent reviews by Zinkoner

Good game, probably one of Valve's best. Pity about the fanbase.

The game bills itself with the idea that you're a fugitive prison escapee, and it holds faint traces of a survival system (visible in finding food in the wilderness + a few early dev screenshots)... but the police never really act to recapture you (half the time when you commit NEW crimes, they don't really react), and it's very, very easy to get comfortable in the game. By the time I finished my three-hour playtime, I was lugging around thousands of dollars and multiple late-game weapons, despite not leaving the starting area.

TL;DR: The game has a really interesting premise, but fails to follow through with it.

The final level highlights several issues with the game while also introducing new ones. For a start, the 'pause' menu doesn't pause the game. Not noticeable when you're just playing a platformer - very noticeable when you're playing a platformer with a time limit.

I also managed to produce an interesting glitch as a result of the lack of any pausing: alt-tabbing out of the game and then alt-tabbing back in resulted in the rising water now being above the player character, allowing me to take the level at my own pace (until I fell and died in the water that was still at the bottom of the map). When I tried this a second time, the water worked properly and drowned me the moment I tabbed back in.

You also have the sudden scarcity of checkpoints: previously, every cannon in a level served as a checkpoint, and you'd respawn at the one you were last shot out of if you fell. In the final level, there is... maybe one checkpoint right before the end? Any other fall drops you straight back to the start.

And then there's the true ending. Two steady jets of confetti, a "You win!" message, and the option to jump back down the hole you came up and drown yourself. That's it. Then you head back to Steam and...

...None of this game's achievements work.

I'm going to sort this review into four sections, to outline my biggest gripes with the game.

1. Controls.
The mouse input is slow, and at times feels laggy. There's no option to change it, so you're stuck trying to aim more by moving your character to aim at the enemy rather than aiming it right at them. It feels even slower in menus, which makes navigating them an awkward chore.

2. Game Balance
This can be summed up in one word: fireball. The fireball is the first real spell you get, and it deletes practically anything you point it at. You also have a normal/primary attack, which is so laughably weak you're better off just dodging while you wait for your fireball to recharge, and some other spells, which fall into the category of "I guess I'll cast them while I wait for the fireball to recharge".

Seriously, the fireball does more damage than your ultimate attack. It also has a pretty quick cooldown, and will one-shot anything that isn't a boss or one of the bruiser-type enemies.

3. Pacing
This can be summed up in one fact: it took me thirty minutes to realise the tutorial took about five.

4. Story
The game tries to communicate its story via small drops of information. However, it makes the fatal mistake of not having any sort of framework to set these droplets. You're a former (member? leader? founder?) of the Butterfly Gang. You're hunting someone named Blake, who betrayed the gang and/or was also a member, and apparently killed a bunch of the gang's members before you got... back to the gang's hideout, where he's waiting, except he isn't? You're given little scraps of the life of each gang member (Isaac has a locket that he keeps as a memento of his sweetheart, some other guy left his knives lying around, etc), but there's no cohesive narrative.

Good sides? I sort of like the art style for the environments (if they weren't endlessly repeated, and if the enemies didn't look so stupid).

Tl;dr: enjoy walking through endless desert canyons, awkwardly trying to aim fireballs, while the game fails to tell a story? This is probably the game for you.

Useful little relaxation tool.

This game completely ruined my sleep patterns after I bought it for Christmas and then played it for more than eight hours a day. I have been forced to uninstall it so that it doesn't ruin my life forever. 10/10 would play again when I am mentally strong enough to do so.

Pros: good atmosphere, decent gameplay with some interesting ideas, interesting story.

Cons: story isn't fully fleshed out owing to the game's time constraints, the mouse sensitivity is terrible and makes it hard to react (especially during gunfights), the crosshairs are misleading (they'll show your shots as being tightly accurate and on-point before sending them massively wild, even at close range), your targets are STUPID (they're just regular guards... which means they'll come investigate your actions rather than trying to stay safe).

All in all, SCORCH is an alright game that would be much better if it was a full game with a full game's story and a full game's options menu.

Visuals and music are nice, but repetitive, even for a short game like this (finished in 13 minutes). Level design is uneven, as the first three levels have no threats at all, and see you walking back and forth collecting the same shirts to open the gate, while the 'enemies' on the fourth just stay in place and don't move, allowing you to walk around them. Slow character movement makes this even more boring that it sounds, and substantially ramps up the difficult of the final level, which seems to require almost frame-perfect movement to beat the timed areas. And then, just as you're warming up, the game ends.

Also, you can bring up the pause menu during the pre-game loading screen.

The game has good graphics and performs well, the gameplay is solid, and though the English is patchy, there's nowhere in the game where there's an actual miscommunication. It's a solid zombie shooter all around.

You might be looking at this game under the impression that FPS stands for First Person Shooter. You'd be wrong. It stands for First Person Spotter; because whoever spots their opponent first will just blow them away with the game's ridiculously punishing guns. Seriously, how is a semi-automatic rifle that deals one hit kills on body shots even remotely balanced?