You know, when you strap on a VR headset for the first time, you’re going to want to play one of the classics: Beatsaber, Space Pirate Trainer, Astrobot, Gorilla Tag, Lucky’s Tale, Half-Life Alyx (which I still need to play btw . . . it’s in my backlog), etc. The last thing you think of playing is a match 3 game in VR, but here we are . . . reading all about them on The Friendly Necromancer blog of all places. Yup.
And I have to say . . . you know that feeling when you’re playing a game and you feel like . . . so this is what we’ve come to. Well thankfully, Fatal Gem won’t be the last game I ever play. We’re just gonna put that $3 price tag down to a fun experiment. You know, like buying a six-pack of RC Cola because you forgot what it tasted like.
That’s right! Fatal Gem is a VR Match 3 game on Steam for the low price of $3 and a little bit of your dignity. Right off the bat when you find yourself in darkness trying to grab a pickaxe reading some hacked together English, you know things are gonna be a bit dicey.
Fatal Gem is traditional match 3, but since it’s in VR, the playing field wraps all the way around you, and I gotta give it up to this game for that mere fact. If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be completely surrounded by match 3 gems, this is your game. You get 3 levels of timed-point-gathering play, and that’s it. The crazy thing is, either way, you’re going to blow up. Victory or Defeat . . . it’s all the same in Fatal Gem, the only thing that really matters is your score at the very end of the game.
Do I have complaints about this game, yeah, I mean besides the obvious lack of content and re-playability, um, of course I do.
My main complaint is this: I don’t like that the game makes me wait to make matches until the cascades of gems have finished, especially when the game is pitting you against a timer. This is especially bad in a 3D space because while the game is cascading in front of you, you should be able to be making matches behind you or to the sides of you. It’s a match 3 philosophy that every match 3 developer has to make. Do I lock the board during cascading, or do I come up with a tech solution to allow players to make matches during cascading? It’s not a bad thing that boards are locked, if it makes sense for the game you’re building. For instance, I absolutely loved the match 3 gameplay in Gems of War. Gems of War, locked the board during cascading, and that was fine for that game. On Animal Cove, we didn’t lock the board, and it made timed levels play a whole heck of a lot better. Fatal Gem is a timed level experience . . . you see what I’m throwing down here?
Next complaint, the controls are a little weird. Sometimes gems would just shift on their own if I was clicking the trigger button too much during a gem cascade. I had to slow down and wait for the gems to settle before trying to make a match, otherwise gems would just seem to shift on their own after the cascade.
There was really only one power up, an AOE explosion gem, and I have to say it was super disappointing that there wasn’t a horizontal line clear ability. It would have been so cool in a board that wraps all the way around you to have a line clear shift all the gems.
My final complaint is just polish notes. If I win the game, let me be dragged up into the UFO as a victory sequence. Don’t blow me up. If I do blow up, just polish what that looks like so it doesn’t feel so unfinished. That’s all. Just put a little extra love into your craft and art. It would be appreciated.
So, while Fatal Gem may not be the best VR Match 3 experience out there, I have to hand it to them for surrounding me in gems. It’s a fun use of Virtual space. Outside of that, man, polish the game a bit and you could have some potential. As it is now, this feels like buying a six-pack of RC Cola and remembering why you didn’t like it.
Happy Dueling!
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