Comit the Astrodian 3 Reviews

Level design wasn't there for this one

"Comit the Astrodian 3" is a copy + paste of the previous game in the series (I was alarmed and distressed to find out there's more than one of these), and suffers all the same defects, from the misspelled title down to the broken keyboard controls. Because this is just a copy + paste with some things rearranged, of course the engine problems are the same. When using the keyboard, the same bug is present and you can't move left or right if you're jumping, which renders the game unplayable. I can understand one game not being tested properly, but this is the fourth of these copy + pastes I've had the misfortune to run into. This is a serious problem. Anyway this is a garbage ripoff of Sonic/Mario, only massively worse, and has zero actual value as a serious game for PC gamers. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one. 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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", LunarCore Games has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. "Comit the Astrodian 3" is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

Comit the Astrodian 3 follows Comit once more, with a new threat emerged, Cosmo Knight. Join Comit once more with his brilliant flying capabilities, this time being accompanied by a friend, Juni, in order to stop this new foe. This game is the hardest in the series yet, testing everything you've learnt from the previous games, in the potential final battle to save the star system... As I loved both 1 and 2, I can once again say, do try this if you enjoyed the originals!

While I enjoyed the other two games so far in the series, this one takes a huge step back. Levels feel extremely constricted. For a game that lets you jet around 9 times out of 10 you'll hit a wall and are forced to go through incredibly tight platforming areas, and with how fast and somewhat sporadic your character controls you'll die a lot. The pits in these games are a huge problem and I wish they would just be removed entirely in this series- you never know just how far down the levels go until it too late and you die over and over. There's not that many stars to collect. If you die, whatever red stars that you had are gone so you'll have to redo everything just to get a chance at the bonus level again. The achievements are all level and star based which is great, except two which require you to slog through the bonus levels, if you can even get to them.