VIVIDLOPE Reviews

awesome game with a 2000s aesthetic

Just... [i]the AESTHETIC, man!![/i] This does not feel like a game made in 2023... [b]in a good sense![/b] Congratulations to the developer [i]Jaklub[/i] for fully realizing this fantastic project. I missed fun arcade games like this one!

Overall Rating: 4.5/10 Mm... For me, this game gets a hard pass. That doesn't mean mechanically, it's bad. In fact the game worked well, and I didn't see any bugs but there are far too many level select screens and far too many confirmation screens. I might come back to this at a future date, but I didn't enjoy the experience I had in the 20 minutes I attempted to play through this. The scoring system per-level seems to be somewhat arbitrary, and there was no real sense of difficulty progression between levels. Instead of it getting increasingly more difficult, I found the difficulty to be randomised. What I mean by that is for me I'd get an A to S ranking on a level, and the next one would be much more difficult and leave me stuck getting a D. It just feels as a player that the levels seem more random than structured in a way where each one feels like you're progressing or getting more challenging. I also didn't enjoy the 'quick get as many blocks unlocked before you run out of speed' end-of-level mechanic, as while I understood the concept, the need to 'rush' to the get a high score kind of adds too much urgency to the game, and makes it easy to accidentally not complete the entire level, for me to enjoy it personally. This is a 'me' issue in games like this. It'd be much more fun for me personally if there was a way to disable that, and instead just play the game without that mechanic added in. The sound design is good, and the art direction plus style were fun, and the various shapes of the levels were interesting, but for me personally I'd have difficulty recommending this game as I didn't enjoy it on a personal level, and as such I'm going to suggest to give this one a pass, unless you don't share my takes up above.

Awesome game, simple fun gameplay with no fluff and nice aesthetics

Great action platformer game. If you're a fan of the Dreamcast era of gaming, then look no further. The vibe, gameplay, and creativity feels right at home as if you were playing a Dreamcast game.

VIVIDLOPE is a rare triumph where both style and substance are beautifully woven together. It joins the ranks of games like Pizza Tower- where the gameplay is beyond solid, the music is great, and the chosen aesthetic is maxed out to its fullest potential. Do not tread this game lightly, as it is as pure of a video game as you can get. The game is arcade in nature, and getting V-ranks requires hard work and dedication. This may be problematic for some, but for those who relish in the challenges of perfecting games like Crash Bandicoot, you will have ample opportunity to master each one of VIVIDLOPE's creative and intricate 3D levels. For those who just want to soak in the Areo Frutiger backdrops and bubbly edm pieces, you can ease up the difficulty and enjoy your time running around as one of the cute characters and smash the variety of enemies to bits... but let me reassure you, true enjoyment of this game demands that you take off the safety gloves, and go bare-knuckles for those high ranks for as many levels as you are willing to sink time into. No glitches as far as I can tell, perfect UI (though minor complaints about the main menu-hubworld-level select pipeline can be made), responsive controls, and engaging levels and enemies. I couldn't ask for more from this wonderful game, and that's when I believe a game is perfect: When it gives everything it has on its own merits, and its nothing short of beautiful and fun.

From a purely artistic standpoint, this might be one of the most impressive games, which provided me with the most awful experience I had for a while. The game oozes with style, identity, and that quirky early 3D retro nostalgia that reminds me of games like Kula World and Super Monkey Ball. So it's easy to look at screenshots and clips to fall in love with its charming aesthetic. But what you don't perceive is all the tedium that comes along with the core-gameplay premise. Colouring each tile in a successive chain while dodging randomly spawning enemies while being dependent on, as well, randomly spawning items just doesn't synergise that well. It might seem like it kind of does in the first few worlds, when the layouts of the levels are compact and assessable, but pretty soon their size and the amount of different enemies increase so that with each successive world the game becomes more and more exhausting. But not only do their sizes increase, but also the conditions of colouring the tiles. So it's not like every level demands you colour each tile one time; oh no, there are levels where you have to walk through every tile two times, doubling the amount of space you have to walk. A few levels later you get introduced to the concept of tiles reversing back to their initial colour, so now you have to recolour each tile you walk on more than one time, or two, because in the worst levels these two conditions are combined, ensuring an absolute slog of a level experience. The way the levels are designed, it's often times impossible to walk through every tile only once; some of them have mechanisms that force you to backtrack more than once, some are just confusing to navigate, and the flood of enemies won't ever stop, so it's not like you are really interested in solving puzzles or absolving timing jump sequences when you're under stress, forced to dodge stuff constantly left and right. The vast amount of enemy types make sure that the level flow becomes erratic and chaotic in a hard-to-conceive way. It's not just that every few seconds enemies drop from designated landing zones; no, sometimes they just spawn if you walk over a tile, cluttering sometimes extremely narrow stages further. If you have no weapons, there is not much you can do about that, especially while you are way more bothered with now reverting any coloured tiles. It's so freakin annoying having to frequently mess up your own patterns because you have no other opportunity. Later on it's just pure enemy spam, with so, so goddamn annoying types that only further increase the amount of tedium: Randomly spawning spawners that summon ultra-fast little tracking blobs. Chasing bombs that spawn right next to you and are faster than you, enemies that just revert your colours and run away from you, enemies that just spawn lasting mines around you, etc. It's just a big mess. And yes, despite all that, I kept playing on the "hard" difficulty, simply because it was renamed in later patches. Back then this was the only mode, but the game was that frustrating; the developer introduced an easy mode. Now, in an even later update that nerfed the game overall, "easy" is now "normal" and "normal" is "hard," so this is the intended experience, which I judge the game for. Seriously, there were so many changes for this game over time that pretty much can be seen as a sign that the premise just doesn't work out for most people. Sure, the changes made the game more comfortable, but they don't fix the tedious nature of the core gameplay loop. Eventually after world 3, when I saw that it just became more and more annoying getting V-Ranks, I stopped caring, but aside from V-Ranks, there are no tangible values from the scores the game ranks you; either you get the highest score or anything else, but there is no incentive to try to get a score that is as good as possible when it's not perfect. Which leads to a playstyle that only bothers finishing every level. But finishing every level is kind of trivial when you could practically just spam all the cheap items you can additionally buy from the shop; there are more than enough overpowered ones that draw out all the tedious aspects but also render the game trivial for the cost of reducing your rank, which doesn't matter anyway as long as it's not a V-Rank, which is again not worth bothering with. So what you're doing is trading a feeling of frustration for a feeling of "nothing." The same goes for the newly introduced character for the Switch release. "Miss Noir." It seems like the developer knows that a lot of people hate the way you're dependent on randomly spawning items, so he just created an additional character that, compared to the others, is absolutely overpowered. Once you fill up your power bar, you can simply attack enemies with a very low cost of your power that refills anyway if you constantly tile, which fills anyway if you defeat enemies, and then she can still carry items. So if I bothered with this character from the main campaign, the experience would be extremely different and less tedious, but still not good, because now enemies are just fodder. So no matter what band-aid fix the developer comes up with, the game won't just get magically "enjoyable" for people who weren't enjoying it in the first place. I think the designer has a lot of potential and is very talented but is held back by holding on to a premise that just doesn't work that well. So time and time again they made large-scale changes that completely altered the fundamental behaviour of the game, introducing ways to trivialise the game, rendering any achievement relative. So while the game is impressive from an artistic perspective, mechanically it is far from that; the artificial scoring rules only highlight this, I think. When you only have to colour 20% of all tiles in succession. Why not 100%? I mean, that would be the definition of perfect, not just 20%. But no, you cannot do it, because the designer knows 100% is way too frustrating if not nearly impossible with the erratic nature of the enemies, and I think that's the biggest indication of why the premise is so flawed. (Oh, and really having to collect 2 fruits every time, which I often tend to forget at the end, adds nothing to the experience besides even more frustration.) If the designer thinks it's not appropriate to play "really" perfect, then maybe the game isn't perfect either. As an aspiring designer, you mustn't stop at this point; in a really well-designed game, you could absolutely expect 100%, not just 20. And so the game goes on and on with way too many levels that don't feel like they have a good reason to exist. There are some less annoying and some that are even good, with unique hazards aligned in an interesting way, which also shows that the designer actually can create good levels, but a large amount of them, approximately half, are just more of the same in a slightly different layout. Seriously, sometimes less is more; the game is just way too long. Smaller worlds of 7 levels could've worked as well, only keeping the most interesting, most substantial, and unique. This is an example of a technically well-executed game that tried out something unique but never managed to find a way to create a deep and interesting system. I'm pretty sure a lot of casual players might still enjoy it for just playing through it, but if you expect to challenge yourself, these challenges are the very opposite of satisfying; they feel like a waste of time. [h1] 3/10 [/h1]

This should’ve been an easy thumbs up, but around world 4 things started to sour for me, and I gave up on grinding for each level’s Perfect rank. (I did finish the game by switching to easy difficulty and skipping optional levels) The core gameplay is moving, jumping, and using items, but it’s such a joy to do that it’s not even a problem. What is a problem is the way the game scales its difficulty. (At least in Hard mode, which I enjoyed for the first 3 worlds of the game) The later stages are more populated with enemies, and it starts feeling overwhelming very quickly, even with items. For example, the hammer item is so much fun to use, (like all the items!) but it smacks down two tiles away from you, meaning that you sometimes have to aim awkwardly when the map contains a pathway that’s 2 tiles wide or narrower. Aiming for a perfect rank amongst the enemy chaos becomes especially hellish when the game starts introducing new tile mechanics. Some tiles are invisible until you are next to them, but they aren’t randomized, so anyone who memorizes a map layout makes this mechanic effectively meaningless. The game also introduces levels that require you to walk over tiles twice to make them change to the target color, which seems interesting but kind of killed the pacing for me. The worst offender to me are levels where walking on a completed tile resets it, punishing you for backtracking (even though the combo and rank systems already discourage it). It was not a good feeling to retreat from enemies and accidentally create a bunch of unpainted patches on the map. I started skipping optional levels if they contained the step-twice or the backtracking mechanic. As any game should, Vividlope gets harder over time, but I felt annoyed rather than engaged.