Opening Thoughts:Length is one of those things thats hard to judge in games, for everyone it is going to be different some people will have short attention spans so they will be looking for short games, whilst others will prefer a long complexe adventure. As a rule of thumb I find that a game needs to last at least 20 minutes but an go longer so long as you have some overall goal or different puzzles turning up. I hope that kind of helps people understand where I am coming from sometimes.
Visual:The visuals in this game are nice and varied, throwing us through many different rooms each with some sort of style different to the last one, but here is the problem, the styles have a tendency to repeat. Lapis lazuli, glowstone and lava are the three key block types you'll see in this map which seems to defeat the purpose of making the levels different. At least with maps that choose to have one consistan tyle it reflects the story r puzzle types, here it just seems to be random attempts to make it bright and fun. In t's self the colour and style changes are nice, but they still seem random and a tad uniform.
[6/10]
Challenge:Yhea it's all right, there is much in the way of rising difficulty as you begin on puzzles that are some what difficult but when youre doing the same style puzzles towards the end it really becomes far too uniform for there to be much challenge left
[3/5]
Length:As I said in the opening I judge games on a rough minim time and then whether they overstay their welcome and unfortunatly ths game falls into the later category. Your over all aim is to find 3 ender pearls, and it takes a good 10 minutes to get to the are where the actually hunt for the pearls will begin and the the actual search section is rather short. Okay you'd be thinking, doesn't this game still fit? Well no because once you have the pearls there is a whole other section that seems to ccome out of nowhere and is the same length as the actual story secton. The problem with their being this part is that it just feels unnecessary, it'd be like if in Mario you rescued the princess and then did another 5 levels for no real reason
[2/5]
Story:I'm going to be kind here and not score the store, mostly because it is barely there. I think your supposed to be some dude who just happened accross some other fellows map so you thought you may as well try and find these pearls he talks about, but as I said in the length section the story ends but the game keeps going, if you wanted to extend out your game then you really should have either made the challenges longer or come up with a new and COMPELLING reason to keep playing.
Puzzle Variety:This is pretty good, you run around multiple areas with a lot of new and interesting puzzles, but again the endng area starts to mare us. They all get a bit boring and repetative, which only adds to the feeling of pointlessness for the ending area.
[7/10]
Things that need Improvement:- Length
- Story
- Visal necesity
Things that need No-Improvement:- Visual Variety
Final Thoughts:In the end this map just runs on too long, you could easily end the whole lot once you get the third pearl, just reroute the minecart ride at the end to a finished scene. Yes the creator probably had more ideas they wanted to crowbar in, but it isn't good map design to just slap it on the end to artificially pad out the game.
Percentage Score: 60%
Link: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/712632-puz-ender-crystals/
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