Insane Reviews

Seem to be same as old Amiga version, thumb's up

Insane is an older game from 2016. It's a venerable 8 years old at the time of this review. It's a easy to learn, difficult to master puzzle game where you're presented with a series of socketed wheels. Marbles roll at you at a set pace (whether you like it or not) and you have to rotate the wheels to populate all of them. In some ways this isn't completely different from the 1980's boardgame/toy, Downfall, where you rotate cogs to try get all your pieces through the system before your opponent on the other side. Okay. But there's more. You need to populate all the wheels with marbles of matching colour, weirdly, so they all explode at the same time. I'm not sure what the exploding is for. To make a hum drum boring concept more exciting? From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there's 3D graphics and even a couple of settings, it's just a fairly static playing board. I mean, the static wheels and marbles look shiny and nice, but there's no point in excellent graphics if the game itself is so bland... which makes me wonder if I don't like bad graphics because they're almost always associated with bad games, but here, we have "okay" graphics wasted on what looks and feels like a Flash/mobile game. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. This is indistinguishable from a mobile app, but they put this on Steam instead of the app stores by mistake. Was it rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all)?. Regardless, for all intents and purposes Insane might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Insane didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing level 10, trivial to get, but less than 27 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Insane has the greedy, cash grab price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

In brief Insane is a Logical remake that's not quite there. Before I get into why I don't recommend Insane I need to talk about Logical. I first played it on the C64 way back in the day. I really liked three things about: it's puzzle nature, the frenetic action and the musc. Time passed and I moved on from my C64 to a PC and played the DOS port of logical. It lost something in translation, the music most notably but also the mouse controls never really felt as good as the C64's weird joystick scheme. Insane, unfortunately, lost something even further in translation. It's by far the prettiest Logical I've seen and the music is servicable (not as memorable as the strange sad upbeat music of the original). But... The problem lies with the controls and the gameplay speed. The locks turn very, very slowly. The Commodore version had exactly one frame of animation on the diagonal. Those locks could be spun fast, literally about 10 to 15 quarter revolutions a second. And it was necessary to keep the balls in play as they also rolled around quite quickly. In insane the balls roll slowly but relatively faster than the locks spin leading to many unintentional bounces and missed catches. This is further exacebated by the mouse controls. Both the DOS and Amiga versions used a two button scheme. One button to throw the ball and the other to twist the lock. Insane uses one button to do both, miss clicking is a constant and annoying problem as there are no cues as to whether the mouse is over the lock or a ball. Add a little pause to the end of the rotation cycle during which the lock can't be clicked and you have only a slow puzzle game that rarely executes the expected actions. I hate to write this because I loved Logical and have played many remakes of it over the years; and collected quite a lot of remixes of it's music. Insane lacks the speed, the varied backgrounds, the tight controls and even the number of levels of the original. I didn't enjoy it and it's not a game I can recommend. Sadness.