I recently got Shadow Complex, as did everyone else in the world. But, unlike everyone else, I have some severe problems with it–the limitations of downloadable on current-gen platforms show in the character models, which I found remarkably bad for an Epic-ish product on UE3 on the Xbox 360. However, I do like that I haven’t gotten the “UE3 texture loading” pop-in facet yet–and I’m hoping that it doesn’t rear its ugly head.
It does have some strange game design choices, though. Like the oft-mention flashlight that runs out of batteries, but takes less than a second to recharge once it does. I also, personally, don’t like that you have to shine the flashlight to find secret items–Metroid was never like that. The colors were revealed to you.
The spacing of checkpoints is atrocious, in my opinion. Please don’t put a checkpoint, then a boss, then a firefight, and then have the character have to go back to before the boss when they get killed. I also don’t like the design during the first boss–you need grenades to defeat it, but you only get six, and getting more is quite difficult.
All in all, it looks like a fun Metroidvania explore-em-up, but with some deplorable choices in design and unforgivable checkpoint spacing. After playing it more I may post further impressions.
I’ve recently learned of Dog Adventure Game Engine (Dage), and I’ve been trying to get into it. It’s got HUGE potential–I might make some editors for it for myself for personal use if I can ever get out of the bug I’m in–but it needs a bit of work. I think that if the author open-sourced it a lot of things could be worked on, and I hope that if he ever does discontinue it that he open-sources it. I can’t wait to follow this program’s development. It’s about time the indie community had a 3D adventure creator. I also can’t wait until some great talent catches on and releases a killer freeware app on it.
Well, that’s it for now. You should really all follow me on Twitter! All negative one of you!