Saturday, March 29, 2014

Artillerize --- Flash Ryview

Artillerize, by Colburt187




Artillerize is a defense based flash game that captures the rudimentary base building aspects of the genre as well as good old fashioned shooting.

Right off the bat, I have to say that I loved the music it was great throw back to classic 8-bit Nintendo games and it gave the game a bright, energetic touch. It definitely helped pump me up before playing. I usually play games on mute, but I do like to at least sample the music. And in this case, I can honestly say it was great to hear. It did get stale after awhile because it was only one song on about a 100 second loop. But still, it had me keeping the sound on for a good solid 15 minutes, which is considerably longer than most flash games.



The actually game mechanics were fairly cool. I definitely liked the freeform base structure building. I felt that it was a little flat in terms of impact on gameplay, but the idea behind it was fantastic. Full control over where you build your base. Very nice. The shooting was fairly straightforward, with Space Invader style flying enemies. I felt that using the keyboard controls was essentially the "impossible" difficulty and I quickly switched over to mouse controls. I found the former basically un-usable, but the fact that the other option was available made the game not suffer because of it. I wish I could say the same about Loot Heroes.

The building aspect did seem limited, as you could only place so many auto-turrets and the walls were fairly meaningless unless they were directly above your ammo supplier. And even then, you can repair buildings during a wave, if necessary. And as a shooter it was fairly bland. Only one type of  bullet, only one type of cannon. And there was no continuity between levels. No scoring system, no upgrades, no way to carry over unused gold. It made for very little satisfaction in victory.



There are two game mode, but they have very few differences. In one you start with a premade base, in one you don't. The gameplay is otherwise identical.

I will say, playing on google chrome, the game was lagging for me and the author had already identified the problem and listed a fix as a comment, which I implemented.

So, this is a game where I was very impressed by the creator, both for awareness and for concept design, but there just wasn't enough variety of content. It needed other guns, other enemies, or something to keep the game fresh from level to level. I would have appreciated an upgrade system that correlated to in-game experience and a reward for leftover gold.

Scorecard:

Category
Score
Time Value
6
Money Value
10
Originality
9
Ryplayability
7
Fulfillment
2
Final Score
6.8

Let me know what you think of Artillerize!

Until next time,

Ryan




Pictures courtesy of ArmorGames

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