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Sunday

Apr102011

Googly-Eyed Splitters - Review

Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 4:35PM

Googly-Eyed Splitters is basically a game....about Googly-Eyed Splitters. Splitters being a pink ball of fur, which is able to split into two, different colored balls of fur. The gameplay revolves around solving different puzzles with the goal of getting to the box, which is the end of the level.

The catch is that many of the puzzles require you to split and use both "Splitters" to complete a level, sometimes controlling both of them at once. The game does guide you where to go with certain gateways which only the red or blue splitter can go through. But there are many other obstacles such as buttons, lava pits, moving platforms, bolders and etc.

The game boasts 40 different levels spanning across 4 different worlds. Different worlds do offer different art styles and some different challenges but that's about it. Beyond the 40 levels there isn't much replayability besides playing through the game a 2nd time. The levels do increase in difficulty but not at a steady pace, one level may take me 20 minutes and then the next 2 so the difficulty curve is something like a squiggly line.

I think the main thing to focus on with this game is its physics, which I don't believe are being used nearly to their full potential. The physics are pretty good for an indie game, stuff rolls, carries momentum, bounces, and etc. as you would expect them to in real life. Though one thing which I found an annoyance is how the character is round. In the game you have to roll across surfaces and roll ontop moving bolders, the first problem is that because you do carry momentum, you tend to slide across the ground which can easily lead to your death. The other thing is rolling ontop a boulder, because you are playing a circle, it is very hard to stay ontop of another, larger, moving circle. The best way to summarize this, is that there doesn't seem to be any form of friction within the physics.

Those aren't the only problems with the game. First off, controlling two splitters at once does seem like an interesting concept, but it doesn't work all that well. You control one of them with the left analog stick and trigger, and the other with the right stick and trigger. Because the only difference between the splitters are color, it is very hard to keep track of which is controlled by which side, which can lead to confusion and death within the game. Im not sure if I don't have the "Minimum IQ required to play this game" or something of the sort, but I found that it really just doesn't work well. I have also encountered the occasional bug such as falling through the ground.

The levels are mostly made up of floating cubes infront of a background image. The textures are mostly the same and are really repetitive, and usually have lines between each cube which are pretty easily noticed. The different textures in different worlds does help with it not being too repetitive, but the difference just isn't enough. The audio is mostly a few quirky sound effects along with a single looping music track. The music track almost reminds me of one of the background songs from the MMO Flyff, it sounds pretty good, but because it is the only track played throughout the whole game, it gets boring after 10 minutes, and annoying after 20.

Overall it is a solid puzzle game with a cute and almost professional art style which just doesn't have the needed polish. The gameplay is a good concept but poorly executed and the sound is nothing special. If you are willing to spend an extra $2, I would recommend buying Breeze instead. It is a very fun puzzle game with entertaining gameplay and 20 more levels than Googly-Eyed Splitters. The art is much better and diverse, and it has a multiple background songs, one per season (or set of levels), along with much more replayablitiy with multiple levels of difficulty. But if you want a cheap $1 puzzle game to pass a few hours (at most) then Googly-Eyed Splitters isn't the worse choice you could make.