Adventurer Pets HD is a nicely presented 2D platformer which features various pet animals as main characters.
Although the graphics are quite pretty, the controls feel floaty and slow to react. This ends up making the gameplay rather dull and boring. To the game’s credit, though, there are six levels and 3 different modes, with the ability to pit 4 players against each other, racing to collect treasures from around the map.
If the controls were tighter and the gameplay a little faster and tweaked, Adventurer Pets HD could be a decent little timewaster, but for the moment, it’s not particularly inspiring.
Adventurer Pets HD was developed by Arrogancy and is available for 200 Points.
Note: The in-game music isn’t as bad as the trailer’s soundtrack, don’t worry.
This title was 200 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 80 Points.
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Waaay, waaay to sluggish to be playable and really bland design. I’m always suspicious whenever something throws up a massive “you need to play it this way to get the most from it” disclaimer at the start and to be honest, I wouldn’t want to invite any friends round to play it. I’m not that cruel.
That is, unless we all wanted to play a game of move really slowly, get caught on the slopes when stepping off ropes and my own personal favourite of “lets see who can jump onto the moving platforms without smashing the controller in frustration”.
Tedious stuff.
Amateurs! I had no problems maneuvering, but you do have to be at full ‘speed’ to clear obstacles and there is precious little room for error.
And yes, it is sluggish and wonky. It seems like a case of developer and developer’s friends have been playing betas so long they’ve grown used to the wonkiness and don’t notice it any more.
Not much fun for one player, but I could see having a few rousing rounds with three more of myself – as I don’t know anyone else who could cope with the controls.
Hey, thanks for the review.
The game might have “new” graphics, but the controls and feel are purposely old school. This is really an update/reimagining of a combination of a few old school single screen platformers (ie. Floyd of the Jungle) where you don’t move that fast and obstacles are rather hard to clear. Like many of them, the movement is based on momentum which is why the above commenter got “caught on the ropes” – the momentum can work for and against you.
We knew it wouldn’t be for everyone – this was a game that was a pure throwback to the early 80′s platformer (pre-Mario), so your criticisms are valid as I can see where you’re coming from. Thanks for your reviews and comments!
Old School is an over-used excuse. Making a retro game doesn’t mean you can sacrifice control of the character. Seeing as this site is associated with RetroRemakes.com, with all 3 reviewers coming from there, we might know what makes a good retro game.
I quite simply said that the control is momentum-based and based off of games in particular such as the mentioned FotJ, which we found fun because you had to be careful with everything you did, whereas some people would get highly frustrated with it. And, since platformers moved away from that style of control post Super Mario Bros. (vanilla Mario Bros still has a bit of that involved), it would probably turn off a lot of people.
In other words, it’s obviously not an excuse, it was a personal choice made for a specific reason. The same guy who programmed this programmed ‘An Awesome Game…’ (one of the DBP finalists) which had “modern” controls that were generally praised across the board.
It’s fine if you don’t like the game. We knew a lot of people wouldn’t. But part of the point of Community Games is to make whatever type of game you feel like making, and in this case, we wanted to go back to 1983 for a little while to a time when you weren’t exactly sure you were going to be able to make a simple jump over some spikes because you didn’t build up enough running room yet. In our next game, we’ll do something completely different. That’s part of the fun of the freedom of publisher free indie gaming design.
Even within momentum-based platforming, there are definitely improvements that can be made to Adventure Pets HD. Having the player sticking to the ground after getting off a rope surely isn’t part of your design decision, is it? Making jumps difficult and requiring a run-up is one thing, but slowing down the player for no reason is another.
It’s fair enough making a game for a specific audience, but if an Old School style platformer doesn’t appeal to retro game enthusiasts, then who is it supposed to appeal to?
I totally appreciate the retro style control that puts a lot of emphasis on momentum. My first impression after one playthrough was that the difficulty was pretty high initially and didn’t let me get to terms with the style of control.
A little ramp up in difficulty would have been better, starting out easy and then getting harder. At the same time, when you’re essentially making a 4 minute demo (due to MS’s CommGames demo restrictions), you can’t make an easy and trivial game that will bore people. It’s a balancing act but I think it could be achieved.
I love platformers and plan to give it another whirl. I was just planning on playing L4D last night but saw a bunch of new CommGames so I gave a few a quick try.
“It’s fine if you don’t like the game. We knew a lot of people wouldn’t. But part of the point of Community Games is to make whatever type of game you feel like making, and in this case, we wanted to go back to 1983 for a little while to a time when you weren’t exactly sure you were going to be able to make a simple jump over some spikes because you didn’t build up enough running room yet.”
And that in itself is cool. Really
This feels *really* broken at times though. It’s got a real running through treacle feel to it and with the precise collision detection, coming off the ropes directly onto a slope and finding yourself almost stuck on a tiny ramp is a bit silly. It’s an unnecessary layer of frustration because it adds nothing to the game except to make it feel broken. In practice, I should be able to move off the rope and straight onto the platform. I don’t know of any platformers (that weren’t fundamentally broken) that’d do this to you.
With the moving platforms on stage 2 of the single player, it doesn’t really -feel- like you can actually make most of them without fluking the collisions because the jumping arc is long but not high (if that makes any sense). It feels like you’re cheating the engine to make it rather than pulling off a pixel perfect leap of brilliance simply because you nip the edge and it sort of moves you up onto the platform.
They’re only small things codewise in the grand scheme of things, but making more player friendly tweaks would remove a lot of the frustration caused and make the game more playable.
You’re well on the right track with it, it just needs *ahem* tightening up *ahem* a tad.
I’ve not played ‘Floyd of the Jungle’, but I (and the others) come from a background where I recognise that while a lot of old games are great, not everything about them is. Oft times things only moved slowly due to weak hardware or behaved oddly due to primitive programming. Remakers are encouraged in the RetroRemakes community to preserve the things they love about a game and fix up the annoyances, as exacting duplications are often obviated by emulation.
Essentially, we find your choice of things to preserve a bit odd.
oddbob;
If that’s the focus, then yes, I can agree with you. Some platforms “curve” on the edges, and your momentum starts at a “0″ point once you land off of a rope, causing you to feel stuck at times just for a second. The only reason I didn’t make a big deal out of that is that, when it was tested, it caused people to jump up the ropes instead of straight climbing, which gives you a needed speed boost in multiplayer as well. It encouraged the “right” course to take so I didn’t make a big deal about it.
I’m not willing to take out the momentum or really make it faster as I think that would lose the multi balance and make scoring too easy/quick (and lose the point of the game since it is a throwback style); but if the consensus is that the edge momentum and “cheating” with the platforms is too much of a barrier of entry, I would be willing to change those things.
Well, at least it’s 200 points… (i haven’t tried this, might not even since it does not appeal to me, even though i still play my atari 2600 every now and then)
Call me old, but I think this has spot-on control. Also, the kitty picture at the end is too cool for words.