Has anyone seen Birdemic? If you haven’t, it’s one of the worst movies of all time. The acting, editing, and special effects are absolutely horrendous, but at the same time you can’t look away. It’s like if a 3 year old paints you a picture, objectively its bad, but you pretend it’s amazing so you don’t hurt their little hearts.
That’s the entire feeling I get from this game. It’s someone who really wanted to be a game developer, and all his/her friends said they were really good, and their parents bought them a PC for Christmas, they even downloaded some free assets and got learned how to do simple code. They thought it was so good, they should sell it to the world!
If you can’t read between my strange analogies, the game is pretty shoddy. It’s reminiscent of those early Flash or Shockwave games from the 2000s, out of place 3D graphics set on 2.5D backdrops, with an inconsistent framerate and plenty of bugs. I was expecting generic, but I got legendary generic. Let’s take a look at the story of the game.
With a set up like this, how could it go wrong!? Well, in every way really. It turns out the game is a linear platformer in which you kill zombies and other monsters. Most of them are rip-offs of the creatures from Left 4 Dead, and not particularly good ones. You use the keyboard to move left and right (no controller support), and the mouse to aim. Various guns litter the levels, but they are all fairly weak. It’s quite difficult to actually kill anything, as enemies suffer very little recoil and can swarm you in seconds. This leaves only two realistic routes to success, standing on top of raised platforms, or simply running straight through the levels. If you die you are returned to a checkpoint, the placing of these is quite sporadic, occasionally there are several to a level, sometimes one or two. The game becomes extremely difficult and frustrating in places.
And then the controls. Oh god, the controls. Moving is an absolute chore, though it looks hilarious to watch your guy running along with his awkward animations. Jumping is the most tiresome part of the design, as you have basically no remit over how it works. You can just about jump up, and forwards with some momentum, but the game decides randomly which type you will actually do, making platforming sections later in the game extremely tedious, as you will frequently fall to your death, and feel empty inside for giving actual time to this.
The gameplay just gets more boring as the game goes on, and there really isn’t much to say about it. From the screenshots I’ve posted here, you can get the entire idea of the game. The graphics are garbage, and the only music appears in the boss fights at the end of every level. All of the bosses have the same name by the way, ‘Voracity’. The boss fights actually tend to be easier than the level at large, there is normally a ledge to stand on and rain down death whilst the AI patiently waits and takes it. The setting of the game is a nondescript African village with strangely green sky that appears to have been through some sort of war, though there are no soldiers left. Why the armies of Africa could not deal with slow shambling zombies I don’t know, they don’t seem to pose much threat to one guy with a machine gun. Occasionally things in the level will just start blowing up for no reason, leaving the player to guess at what is really going on here. Perhaps underneath all the grime and misery there is a beautiful tale to be told, an epic saga of the ages I am simply too dense to uncover. I’m sure philosophers will be discussing this game in a hundred years time when I am long forgotten, the song of Ryan Black, the prophet of our time.
Maybe this entire game is a prank. I spent over two hours of my life playing this game, just so I can tell you how bad it is. And dear god, it is bad. But I can’t bring myself to hate it. I just can’t shit on the dreams of some guy who made it. In my imagination he is a misunderstood soul, bravely chasing his dream despite his lack of skill, ambition or possession of a creative mind. In reality it is probably a Russian scammer that knocked together a piece of crap in 10 minutes to swindle a quick buck from some nice screenshots. I prefer my version. Oh and by the way, don’t google the developer ‘Trazzy’. It seems there is also a porn site with the same name.
