Droid Age!

Droid Age is a maze platformer that was created by Pianotm on RMN and it deals with machines living in a time without man. The majority of this game is just the player moving around an empty city but for the most part I enjoyed playing it. For the record, I played this game for about little over an hour and finally escaped with 293 coins and 2 statues.

-INITIAL THOUGHTS-

I found this game to be oddly charming. The player is given only 1 task, to find the exit and nothing else. This allows the player to play freely but it also gets increasingly gets less exciting as the game goes on. I found myself disinterested in the game after about the first 20 minutes but I continued playing until I reached the end of the maze. The freedom in this game is grand but it also is a double-edged sword. The open world is vast, with many hidden locations to explore and find in the city but the emptiness of the city also makes the exploration seem a bit pointless in my opinion. While I understand that the lack of life was design choice due to the story, as far as gameplay goes, the lack of life also makes the game less appealing. Without more challenges, secrets, or achievements the only people who would play this game would be people who like bare open worlds. Not to mention that the 1 level in the game is static and never changes. Thus, the replayability of the game goes down since there would be no reason to keep playing once you find all of the coins and statues.

-PRESENTATION-

I found the presentation of Droid Age to be quite interesting. From a visual standpoint, I liked how the world was created and how the player is able to leap from building to building in their effort to find all of the coins. However, there are a few small faults in the presentation. One being the main camera. Having the camera be mouse controlled seemed like an odd choice to me, and it felt weird trying to reposition the camera in view where the player could go. Also, in many ledge spots the camera is zoomed in directly onto the character and it is hard to see past the lower region of the character without moving to a different location. While I’m on the topic of the main character though, I really liked the design of the droid and found it to be very well made. I also liked the music that went along with the game.

-ENGAGEMENT/GAMEPLAY-

I believe most people would at least be engaged enough to try and collect all of the coins/statues in the game but after that I feel the engagement would be pretty low. People like a challenge, but when there are no more challenges, they will most likely move onto another game since nothing else really seems to draw people in. As for gameplay, I liked the simplicity of the controls and found the game to run almost perfectly. I did get stuck in a wall once, but I was unable to recreate that experience again. Other than that I found the game to run smoothly. Also having the total number of coins and statues be revealed to the player at the end of the maze helps the player realize how well they did in finding all of the collectables.

-OVERALL-

I say if you like maze games or games with a lot of freedom, then check it out, otherwise I say skip it. Definitely give it a try if you like Puzzle games, or Puzzle Platformers specifically. If you like those then I think you would enjoy playing Droid Age.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Game Making!!