Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Crisp Bacon: Run Pig Run - Fun Farty Gameplay

You can trust the weasel... trust me!

After posting my review to my blog for ShadowCreep, the developer SnottyApps reached out to me and asked if I could review their snotty game "Crisp Bacon: Run Pig Run". The developer sounded sincere enough so I figured, "Why not?!" and decided to give this game a run.

2D side-scroller running game with parkour & porkour gameplay elements, cute 2D graphics, silly humor and flatulent atmosphere. Take control of our hyperactive hero called Crisp Bacon to run, jump, crawl, climb, roll and fart through challenging levels in a quest to find his little brother. Use your reaction, skill and highly responsive controls to dodge away from spiky hedgehogs, sharp saw blades and rolling trees. Butt-stomp annoying bees or break wind to stop them from chasing you. Use flatulence amplifiers like beer and chili peppers wisely to gain speed and increase air control. Don’t forget to collect acorns, since squirrel mob doesn't take wild pigs, trampling their forest, lightly.



Follow me on Google+ for further updates.


Sorry SnottApps, I am the champ right now!

   Right from the title screen we are greeted with a cute set of characters that consist of the protagonist and his enemies (and a shady weasel who gives you free acorns that really have no purpose other than an achievement). After going through the exposition screens (that run for just a little too long), you're immediately dropped into the first stage with instructions on what buttons do what and how much gas a drink or a pepper can produce out of your piggy butt. I like the ability to double jump, but everything in the main ten stages just seem so conveniently placed, like everything is too perfect... not enough chaos. I was able to easily breeze through the ten stages in under 20 minutes... even with hardcore mode enabled. As I was playing through these stages I really did feel like the game was just too easy because even if you FAILED a stage but had enough acorns, you're welcome to move on to the next stage.. Where is the punishment? I know that the developer is always working on the game, but man, where is the challenge if I can just pass to the next stage without even trying? I was going to write this game off as a fun time waster that didn't really push the player to try, but as I continued to play around with the mostly responsive controls (more on that later), the annoying vibration your phones does when you get hit or die (which after an hour I finally looked for the option to turn it off), and the repetitive but not-too-annoying background music, but after I breezed through the game, going back and replaying the first ten stages over and over again (hence why I'm as of this writing the leader-board champ for the three time challenges) because I thought you'd need a butt-load of acorns to progress to each stage (which I was wrong), I finally came to realize this whole time that those first stages were just training for the challenge stages. 

In less than one second, you go from this...

..to this. 
   The challenge stages are very reminiscent of Flappy Bird in that are you given one try and one try only in trying to either stomp your butt on bees, grab acorn, and use chili peppers to fart blast your way to the end in the fast time. Even though once you've "mastered" the controls, getting a high score is not exactly the easiest thing... hell, I only got a score higher than 14 on most of these by memorizing where things were and by that point I may have died over 200 times! I know that in my head as I was playing this game I thought it was a cute, yet easy game.. but now I want to go back and try to beat my score and the scores of others in these three challenges. I love the challenge stages, even if the controls aren't always working, but I really wish there was difficult content in the rest of the game.. the first ten stages shouldn't serve as a guide for taking on those last three stages but unfortunately you're forced to go through the beginning just to reach the last few stages and really that makes the whole thing pointless. Either give us a challenge or don't give us a challenge, don't force the player to endure boredom just to get to the fun stuff because you're going to give the wrong impression with your game. Also, the acorns: when is the Acorn store coming? Having features as "Coming Soon" can work when you have an exciting product but when your game screams, "Hey, the game isn't done!" , it gives off the impression that you're trying too hard. Please, don't try to hard.

Is this game fun? Sure! Is it hard? Only to a point, but I would recommend the game since it tries to do a few things differently but really doesn't strive to be more than a time waster.



No comments:

Post a Comment