Turnament Reviews

Turnament is a puzzle game made by the guy who also made the Half-Quake trilogy, which means: - Addictive gameplay - Clever but solvable puzzles - Great music

This game is great! It made me think and feel smart and dumb at the same time. Also, this game makes my heart beat faster to the point I can hear it, like what the fuck, not even Halfquake did that. Also Also, Commander Neek is an asshole! >)

I've followed the dev process closely for it's whole duration. So I finally was able to give it a go. The gameplay is no surprise to me. But here is my opinion about the gaming "feel" I had after completing the first few campaign missions: The UI is snappy and the controls work perfectly fine. The music is (as for all OSTs from this creator) very nice. The dialogues previous to the missions are mostly light-hearted and entertaining. The only downside is, that I am really terrible at puzzles as well as RTS :| But the game is worth it. It's fun and engaging!

I like the mixture of puzzles and fast, nerve-wracking action. I haven't had that in a puzzle game before. The perfectly coordinated graphics, the stunning sound and a good story (in a puzzle game? I mean: wtf) make this game a real highlight. I would say: an absolute recommendation to buy.

TLDR: you haven't lived until you've played endless mode with all unlockables enabled. Short but sweet. Given the price point, I was surprised by the amount of polish in this game. The campaign is relatively short, about 1-2 hours. I especially liked the pacing of the introductory levels, easing you into the game mechanics while throwing the occasional curveball at you, to keep you on your toes, without ever being unfair. Failing here isn't especially punishing, you merely restart the level, and you have infinite lives. Pro tip: keep in mind you can customize controls up to an extent, so the earlier you find out which control scheme feels more natural to you, the better. Challenge mode is the natural continuation, giving you harder levels for you to sink your teeth into. Pretty fun as well. Only nitpick is that a few of the levels feel like there's no clever way to solve them but trying over and over until you figure out the cues for when precisely to make your moves. Also, don't forget that you can slow time down, that can be quite useful. By the time you're done with this you will probably have enough coins to get all the unlockables. Then there's endless mode, which is exactly what it sounds like. Unlimited levels of increasing difficulty, complete as many as you can without dying. The levels are randomly generated, and there's a neat system in place that lets you set the RNG seed and remembers the latest seeds you played; so if you die and want to try again on the same seed, you can. The unlockables change how the game works for this mode. 100% recommend trying them out, some of them are just crazy. Overall, pretty good game, it's a thumbs up from me!

Have been playing this game coming from the old flash game, I love the music and the gameplay so far it's challenging but good enough to have entertained. I do agree with Flint's review regarding about not controlling the probe as you wanted too, leaving you to restart the level all over again, but so far, I've managed to play it and it's good enough as a game of it's own. You should give it a try.

Fun little puzzle game with varied mechanics.

Turnament is a fun casual puzzle game that's very similar to old browser flash games you could find online Also the game has a sick trailer (no bias) >)

Turnament brings back good memories of the flash games era. To see a remake of this game makes me nostalgic as it was one of the more solid and polished games. I'm also glad the developer included a level editor.. it's almost as if he could read my mind >)

It pains me to write this, because I like Philipp (author of the game) and his works, but Turnament is not particularly fun. It is a remake of the eponymous Flash game from 2006 which was expanded and given a great deal of visual refinement. But the core mechanics stayed the same, and they are just not very exciting today compared to many fantastic modern puzzle games. Turnament is a real-time game in which you control a probe on a grid with the goal of collecting crystals. You dodge enemies and build walls that can block one type of foe. There is a shield that allows you to survive a hostile impact and a repair drone that makes impassable squares clear. That's basically it, and not a lot of puzzle variety can be squeezed from this modest collection. Most of the challenge in the game comes from purely dexterous dodging and escaping and not puzzling anything out really. In some levels you don't even control the probe as it moves around randomly, so you have to protect it and nudge towards destination by building and destroying walls around it -- an immensely tedious and frustrating experience. After you collect a single energy crystal, all normal enemies on a level may as well automatically explode, because you can simply click and kill them all one by one. Maybe destroying an enemy could remove energy, so that a player needs to think about order of killing and about conserving energy. I don't know if it's a good idea or not, I'm just spitballing on the spot while writing this review, but I think the core gameplay should've definitely been re-evaluated and improved, given the chance. The game feels very undercooked, like the effort was put into superficial things like presentation and new modes, while the gameplay, which didn't overstay its welcome in 2006 during a short campaign, is now stretched over bloated modes it cannot really support. The new challenge mode, a set of 30 levels with higher difficulty, greatly illustrates limitations of the game's mechanics. There are a couple of fun levels, but most of them consist either of hardcore pixel dodging or idiot drone herding (thankfully, these can be skipped). I feel like it shouldn't be needed to turn your level into a Japanese shmup simulator to create a challenge in the puzzle game. Endless mode just doesn't work. Levels are too easy and look like something out of teleportation chamber from the movie Fly. Procedural generation of satisfying levels is an immense task, clearly out of scope of a single developer with limited time budget. I think endless mode should've been cut, to be honest. Unlock system is weird and unneeded (though if you don't play with Perfect sound you're doing it wrong). Level editor is robust and fun to use, but it is so difficult to make something challenging without adding frustratingly hard bullet dodging (if you level has BOTH hardcore dodging AND idiot probe, then I won't click the like button, sorry xD). My review sounds very negative so far, so let's talk about what is great. Graphics are clean, readable and look nice. The music is fantastic (buy the soundtrack btw). I think the new character art is very good and expressive. The story is basically perfect for what it is -- it frames what is essentially a set of very abstract levels into a coherent narrative, it is not verbose or obtuse, it provides a nice break and some humor between levels. Probably the only problem with presentation is putting credits in place of level 30. It's wrong! It is about EXPECTATIONS! You play the game, you see that there are 30 levels. You play level 29 and catch up to a BIG BAD. You are hyped for the FINAL CONFRONTATION in the LAST LEVEL! And then there are credits. Immediately deflated. IMO, 'Credits' or 'Epilogue' should be a separate button below the grid, and numbered levels should all be levels. So, this is it. Congratulations on the release! Sorry about the negative review, I just couldn't sugar it up. I'm sorry if it feels bad to read this, Philipp. I admire your creativity and passion all the same, and look forward to your new projects.