Last week I reviewed a game called Hovertanks. I was impressed by the fully rotating 3d play field (wich is a good accomplishment for a flash game) but mentioned the game was pretty choppy due to low framerates.

Holiday Snow Wars uses a similar 3d engine and has fixed the framerate problems in hovertanks, wich is a step in the right direction, but then takes 10 steps back in the actual gameplay.

The art in this game isn’t too bad, but like hovertanks lacks any detail on the ground. Edmund McMillen lends some last minute art to the game due to the original artist bailing out just 2 days before x-mas. But given the crunch time, you’ll notice the art isn’t what it WOULD have been had the award winning designer had a bit more time.

The sound effects are pretty minimal but mostly fitting, and the music is nice and wintery. Normally I would complain about there being only one music track, but you will get bored of the game before you get annoyed by the music.

As I mentioned earlier, the gameplay is sorely lacking. It seems without a game designer directing the development, Florian Himsl (aka Komix, programmer on Triachnid and Blockhead) has a hard time taking an engine and making it into a real game. The 3d play field and the camera rotation works perfectly, but the movement of the characters is extremely slow. The battle mode had 2 characters (Santa and Jesus) racing to snowball each other’s snowman. Basically it’s like a race… whoever gets to the snowman first and shoots a snowball wins.

And then there is the race mode. If they replaced the Santa and Jesus sprites with 2 snails, it might not be so bad, but somehow the cpu player can actually go a bit faster then you can. I don’t know if this is just buginess or if there are some controls to speed up that aren’t mentioned in the instructions.

The speed isn’t the only failure in this game. When you shoot a snowball, you can’t see it. I’m not even sure that I’m even shooting ANYTHING half the time.

Once again I just can’t believe that this is the same kid that programmed Triachnid. Between this game and Blockhead I am seriously starting to question Komix’s programming ability, and wondering if the parts of his games that do work well may not be borrowed source code from open-source flash demos.

Before any of you indy-game fanboys try starting shit with Komix, I want to say on the record that I don’t see anything wrong with using open source code at all. When I got started, I learned a ton from some of the old flash samples on flashkit. I even made some open-source engines myself back in the day that a ton of people used. I’m just disapointed by these latest games from Komix after all the great things I had heard about him.

Maybe next time….

[ Play Holiday Snow Wars ]