THE GOOD PARTS
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The game feels good to play. It’s a great jam experience that leaves you with a great impression. The art, the tunes, and the mechanics are good; the story of the robots adds a some context as to why you’re solving the puzzles and this is always welcome and makes for a wholesome experience once you complete all the main levels.
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It’s a great interpretation of the theme. I really liked the concept behind the gameplay; it was entertaining to play and figure out the proper solution by thinking a couple of steps ahead. A 5-stars interpretation here!
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A lot of levels with good enough quality. The 12 main levels are good enough and don’t make the difficulty curve too steep, which is great because you want the players to reach the end of your entry; the bonus levels are kinda hit-and-miss: sometimes they’re hard to figure out and sometimes they are easy, but for the most part they are a challenge so be ready to think 3 thousand steps ahead with these ones!
THE BAD PARTS
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“The more”, doesn’t necessarily mean “the merrier”. It was fun to play with one robot, it was fun to play with two, and it was (mostly?) fun to play with three robots. The issue here is that the designer increased the difficulty of the puzzles by just making them bigger and not necessarily more complex. Maybe some more tile types would have done more for the game than adding a third robot because the difficulty increase felt a bit artificial (maybe a conveyor belt tile that forced the robot to move in a certain direction, or one that teleported the bots to another place in the map).
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Some extra puzzle complexity would have been nice. Tied to the previous point was the fact that after the first few levels you’ve already seen everything in the game and the puzzles are just a remix of what you’ve already played, which is OK, but after 15+ levels where your only drive is to know the story of the robots it can get a little bit tiring.
CONCLUSION
This is a great game, and a great jam entry. I think this is going to be one of the top ones. There’s not a lot of room to comment on the downsides of this game aside from the occasional bug with the loops or the fact that you can’t individually “debug” the robots to see which part of the algorithm is making them collide with the magnets but hey! This is easily forgivable because this is a jam entry and the time is heavily limited.
I see potential here! Be on the lookout for new tiles/mechanics if you’re going to continue working on this project. This feels great to play! Good work!
