With RPG Elements - The Search Bar!

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

How Low Can You Go? (derp) A Limbo Review

Today was the day, it was the long awaited day! At the time of this writing it's the day Limbo was released on the PC. After seeing it come to the 360 last year and the PS3 a few weeks ago, it was the PC crowd's time to play it.

Limbo is at it's core a 2D platformer like Super Mario Bros or any of the numerous other games. There is a dash of Another World with the way the game feels. The one thing that you'll notice about Limbo from the outset is the art style. It's a silhouetted look with the boy you play as being all black except for his white eyes and everything else is either grey or black. It looks nice but now I've see a few games do it too so it's not as special anymore.

Game play is simple, you move through the world and solve puzzles. Again a lot like Another World or other similar games. But I insult Another World mentioning it in the same sentence as Limbo. Why you may ask? Because Limbo is a giant piece of shit, it sucks so hard.

What the hell? The indie darling of last year is a bad game? Yes it is, for starters you can barely call it a game. It feels like a tech demo, it feels unfinished.

Where to start? I don't know, I guess on the story or the total lack of one. I can understand minimal story but you are NEVER clued in on what's happening. The game starts and ends and you never find out what's going on. The developer said it's open to interpretation, well here's my interpretation! You're all lazy and just didn't want to write a story so you went with the old let the players decide what it all means. LAZINESS!!!

The puzzles are simple, it's obvious what to do at all of them but Playdead made most of them a pain in the ass to complete. One in particular I did the solution multiple times but the game just didn't except it. Eventually I made it past, I guess the game decided to let me continue. A lot of the puzzles are repeated multiple times in different levels. The one in my mind right now you have to deal with 4 times! You get this worm on your head that makes you only move in one direction until you get hit by the sun. It's not fun it's poorly designed and you have to do it 4 freaking times, absurd! I prefer puzzles that are tough to figure out but actually doing the solution isn't the hard part, this game is the opposite. Like I said above every puzzle's solution is easy but doing the solution is infuriatingly hard to do most of the time, because a lot of the puzzles are time based. You throw a switch and you have to hurry to do the next part before the time runs out, THAT IS NEVER FUN! And it's never fun here, the controls have a clunkiness to them that makes rushing to do these tough but for the wrong reasons. Then when you mess up a part you have to wait for everything to reset so you can try again, it doesn't have to be an instant restart like Super Meat Boy but waiting like that is horrible.

The checkpoint system to garbage too, you die and sometimes it sends you way to far back. If I die on a puzzle I should start before that puzzle not the one before it. I've passed the old one, I've proven I can do, what do I have to do it again? Because this game is crap and the developers are assholes.

I played Limbo for 3 hours today, it took me 3 hours to beat it and that 3 hours I will never get back. The game is utter and complete crap, overhyped and I have NO idea why the gaming world was so in love with this game. It boggles my mind! A lot of people compared it to Braid, Braid wipes it's ass with Limbo. It's crap, I hate it, it's one of the worst games I've ever played, actually it may be the worst because it's getting the lowest score I've ever given a game. If you like the art style go to Newgrounds and play Coma it's actually fun and it's free. DON'T waste your money on Limbo, don't, please don't!

Limbo - 0 out of 10 (Fuck this game)