Walls of Jericho - Critique

Been playing Walls of Jericho, an arcade puzzle game from Full Armor Studios and thought I'd post a few comments and see what any others who have played it think.

The Good:
The game looks and sounds great! Graphics, animation, effects, music & sfx, all very well done.

The controls are very simple: click-and-drag blocks around the play screen, releasing the mouse button when they're at where you want them.

The Bad:
When blocks are removed, they explode into a mass of block chips. Nice effect, except when many blocks are destroyed at once, there are so many block chips flying around, they obscure your view of the play area. Not funny when times running out and you can't see the blocks to removed them! Less block chips should have been used or they should fade out quickly (presently, the block chips just fall off the bottom of the screen).

More graphic variety would have been nice, to give a better sense of progression (what little progression I could make ;) Different tile sets, backdrops, ruins and worshipers would really help in giving the player a sense of accomplishment at also act as a nice reward for their efforts.

The Ugly:
The difficultly level ramps up too quickly! I'm busting my click finger just getting to level eight! A lot of arcade type indie games seem to suffer from this: like they're afraid to let the challenge increases gradually. This could be caused by lack of testing by persons other than the developers, who have played the game so much it seems "easy to them".

I feel this only hurts the chances of the game succeeding with more casual game players, as the game just comes across as too hard (which I feel it is).

The Puzzling:
I wonder who the target audience is for this game? Casual gamers? It seems too hard for them (mainly speed wise). Hard core gamers? Mmmm, maybe, but, personally, as a casual hardcore gamer, it doesn't have enough variety or depth when compared to what I could get for five bucks more in the bargain section of my local Gamestop.

Conclusion:
A very nicely produced puzzle game, that could use some major tweaking of the difficulty level and little more variety graphically.

David

Without going into detail I didn't really care for this game. Obviously it appeals to some though. It's the top selling game on Realarcade.

- Steve

Has anyone else noticed that this game is almost a complete clone of Congo Cube (www.congocube.com)? Not that I think that is a sin, but it does point out some interesting things to me:

1) The casual game market is extremely hard to predict. I think that Congo Cube has similar production values and gameplay compared to Walls of Jericho, but it didn't sit at #1 on Realarcade like Walls of Jericho is..

2) People seem to prefer the "rendered" look. I found this out when we started pitching our game "Pandamonium" (which has a "cartoony" look by design). We won't make that mistake again. Our current game we are working on uses all rendered graphics..

Funny, now that you mention it, I remember seeing Congo Cube, but while I thought it looked good, I did not bother D/L it. Something about the look did not appeal to me (too cute maybe?)

The thing that made me D/L WoJ was noticing the little people along the bottom of the playscreen and wondering "what do they have to do with gameplay?"

David

Thats not good news. We've gone out of our way to make our game look cartoony! :(

I wonder if this is a common (mis)conception about cute-looking games being childish or inferior?

People seem to prefer the "rendered" look I don't think you can generalize it like that, it depends more on the overall game design, whether all your graphics fit together, the colors you use, etc.

I've seen very good and very bad examples of both cartoony games and rendered games.

Originally posted by Mike Wiering
I don't think you can generalize it like that, it depends more on the overall game design, whether all your graphics fit together, the colors you use, etc.

I've seen very good and very bad examples of both cartoony games and rendered games.

I agree with Mike. I can think of many games that sold very well using cartoon style graphics. Snood, Bookworm, and RocketMania just to name a few...

I agree with Mike, too.

People doesn't prefer rendered graphics - they prefer a polished look and a uniform style, wich is a bit easier to achieve (and less work) with rendered graphics.

Hey, just look at Zelda: Windwalker :)

Hmm, I guess there's "good" cartoony and "bad" cartoony... I agree, it's easier (IMHO) to create polished graphics using rendering... (at least, for my artist it is).

Anyway, I think we're getting a bit off topic, but still - what do people think about the different "success" rates between Congo Cube and Walls of Jericho?

Eric

well our Torpedo has simplistic cartoon graphics which I still consider as one of its assets...

it's the only depth charge esque game I know of that has this style of graphics so its definately one of its USP's