Cannonball Chuck by Poizen
Time Played: about 14 minutes
Overall Gameplay (9 / 13 points)
- Player Experience: 6/10
- Mechanical Polish: 3/3
Comments: This feels like a fresh take on pool - which I find pretty neat! You can watch how my confusion on the game mechanics progresses in the video above. I did eventually come to fully understand the rules, but they were not particularly intuitive. The phrase "knock off the piece" was what really threw me - knock the piece off of what? They're sitting on a flat board! Once I realized that this was effectively referring to "hit the piece hard enough" it started to make sense to me. Ultimately, I think it's a decent concept, but it needs tweaking. Since the best play is to just nail the 12 over and over again until you approach 50 points, the emphasis is mostly on execution rather than strategy, which I found a bit disappointing. I also don't see any real purpose to the team health bars, given how easy it is to score points - maybe they're intended to prevent intentional stalling? I can't think of any situation where that would be the ideal strategy anyways. I greatly appreciated having a fairly well-written AI to play against, more so one that actually scales in difficulty the further along you get in the story!
Theme Inclusion (4 / 6 points)
Comments: The theme adoption in this game feels a bit weak to me - as if the core game was designed with the theme as an afterthought. But it's still a valid use.
Overall Presentation (7.5 / 10 points)
- General Presentation: 3/4
- Quality of Graphics: 2.5/4
- Quality of Audio: 2/2
Comments: I love to see dialogue boxes and detailed interfaces in jam games. I was delighted to see an in-game explanation of the rules, even if it still took me a bit to figure them out. Not needing to have the entire plot baked into the README is also a huge plus! I enjoyed the personality and consistency in the graphics more so than their actual quality. Nothing felt out of place, and any element that could've used some artwork had some artwork. Music and sound effects were well done - the monkey sound effects on the last stage were an excellent touch!
Final comments: The afterword expresses pride in having built a small but complete game, and I'd have to agree that it feels complete. Of course, there's seemingly always more room for more content, and this game certainly would've benefited from it, but it's a great final product nonetheless.