30 Minutes With Universal Wars

In this series, I'll be examining the Heart of the OHR contest entries in brief 30 minute sessions. As soon as the timer in-game hits 30 minutes, I quite and write this review. 

Author: TheCube (Clint Emsley)

Universal Wars. I definitely thought this was going to be set in space. The title screen certainly doesn't dispel this thought in the least, although I'd be hard pressed to say what those two big blobs are supposed to be. Are they planets? Great circular space beasts about to fight?

Well, I'm not going to find that out today.

Nope, today I'm going to watch television, fight bulls, get infected with mad cow disease, and wander about aimlessly. But first, I'm going to name everybody and everything in the stupidest way possible.

This is why nobody lets me name things

This game is super hard to write about without sounding mean, but I'm going to try anyway.

The graphics are barely passable, and occasionally physically painful to my eyes. If I see one more yellow and black striped floor texture, I am actually going to die. Really, seriously die. I can't tell if the graphics are a joke or just very poorly thought out.

The combat is incredibly boring. There is only one attack. I just used it over and over until the enemies died, and they certainly took their time doing so. So far, I have found no variations on this strategy except for the occasional gimmick enemy who needs to be attacked in a certain order. Even then, the enemies typically do so little damage as to be laughable.

Not pictured: the chain saw I used to kill this bull

Did I mention that the graphics are horrible? They look like they were thrown together in paint in no more than 5 minutes. I mean, look at that bull! Yes that is a bull. And look at those heroes! They are exactly the same except for colors, and Jinjer has a tiny, itsy bitsy pony tail.

Alright, so let's get this out of the way: I was looking forward to my 30 minutes being up for nearly the entire experience. The real saving grace was the bizarre and humorous storyline. So far, it involves evil overlords, talking cow kings, mad cow disease, and teleporting dudes with terrible hair. It's engaging, but will suddenly turn into paragraphs of pointless exposition with no notice.

The townspeople in the "city" of Clamville (three houses) are extremely generic in that "PRESS X TO NOT DIE" sort of way., which is charmingly old-school. It gave me flashbacks to my childhood spent playing Faxanadu and Zelda II.

Alright, this made me laugh

I should mention that the music is all original and charmingly...bad. I guess it fits in with the graphics and lends the whole thing that feeling of playing somebody's first or second game. In fact, I'm starting to think that the game is trying to capture the feeling of an amateur game designed by somebody with pure intentions and terrible self-editing skills.

But honestly, it's very difficult to get past the graphics and terrible combat. It did make me laugh quite a few times, but I don't think I'll be picking this game back up again until its been significantly reworked and it's hard to recommend in its current state. Still, it has that goofy charm that all ridiculous amateur games have, and I don't think the game was thrown together with the intention of being bad. This is a labor of love, but it needs some real beefing up (no pun intended) before it becomes truly memorable.

However, I will not be forgetting these floors any time soon