Estimated reading time: 2-3'
Title: Shift Developer: Black Lime Studio Publisher: Black Lime Studio Release date: 2016-08-16 Regular price: 0,90 € Bundled: Yes Achievements: Yes Cards: Yes
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Shift
5 hours playtime
16 of 16 achievements
cards idling: 1.5h
Shifting another game from unplayed to completed =P
Seen this game popping-up in sg and went to check the store: premises were good so I grabbed it on Tremor.
Unfortunately, implementation didn’t meet expectations.
Base idea is not much of a news: remember those games when you have pipes and you have to connect all the pieces to let water flow from point A to point B? Shift removes the end point and leaves you with the starting one only. The goal? To pass through as many spots as possible.
The game is divided into 2 modes: Ranking and quick matches.
Ranking matches are composed of 40 levels, each with its score to beat to move on, all your scores are summed into your highscore which gets automatically submitted to a global leaderboard. Only the first 20 positions are shown though :\
The quick matches are where the game really needs improvement. I couldn’t find a way to quickly restart a match: everytime I lost the only way to leave was to exit the match, with the game asking for my confirmation about it because “all unsaved progress will be lost” — WHAT?? Which progress? The levels are randomly generated and I just lost! And this is the only way out! ..oh, even after winning a match you are brought back to main screen.
Worst part of this is that you need to play 100 quick matches and won 50 of them if you want to 100% this title.. ouch! (fun fact: my 50th win was also my 100th match and there was no planning behind, it just happened)
All in all, an ok-ish game if you need a short break, perhaps works better on mobile.
During my playthrough I’ve experienced frame drops on long sessions, an unresponsive game while loading leaderboard and generally seemed a too resource-demanding title.
Other than that, a tutorial (even an “how to play”) and a scheme of points distribution wouldn’t be a bad thing.
5/10
On another note, I’ve beaten Google’s doodle for halloween :)
This month theme gives you the opportunity to play The Novelist. If you own it and don’t dislike games for “grown-up” give it a try. Perhaps the game that hit me the hardest with its story. I liked it and was curious to see some other endings but no way I’m gonna live trough all that again. You have been warned =P
Estimated reading time? Handy.
From your post I will add this game to nope nope section. Looks pretty broken and I’m really impressed that you get the achievement with exactly 100 games and 50 wins xD
It’s not really nope nope.. perhaps just one nope =P
It’s not really broken, just badly implemented :\ If you don’t have it yet, I’m sure you can find better alternatives; if you own it already.. well.. maybe one day it could give you 5 minutes of enjoyment, who knows =P
yup, that was kind of lucky! first matches I kept losing because I still hadn’t understood which was the right position of pieces =P
Grindy achievements suck. :( Grats on the 100% !
The Halloween Doodle was awesome. I’m sure I took screenshots too but I can’t find them anywhere!
If you own it and don’t dislike games for “grown-up” give it a try.
Apparently I dislike games for “grown-ups” then… haha
Agreed. 90-95% of times they kill all the fun in playing a game :(
And I love those who make you do something in a different way or something not strictly related to the progress of the game =P
Thanks ^_^
..I can pass you some of mine =P (I have not many.. I’d say 10 at most)
About The Novelist, if you’re one that tends to identify with the characters, it’s not a game that you can play to relax. Basically you’re an entity that follows the vacation days of a novelist and his family (wife and son) and – mild spoiler but not much because it’s what you have to do for the whole game– you have to suggest the novelist what to do. You’re given 3 alternatives (namely, his desire, wife’s or son’s) but you can choose only one (two if you do something more that I don’t remember atm). Do it everytime and try to make everyone happy, if you can.
You can read a lot about it over the internet, here’s a long (and written better than whatever I could come up with my small english dictionary) one that I particulartly appreciated (not that I read many, tbh) =P
Warning! There are spoilers about the story!
You’ve been warned about spoilers, if you’re still ok with it, this way.
Ah, no it’s okay. I’ve played The Novelist, read discussions and articles on the game, watched videos analysing the game, I still don’t like it. The mechanics felt way too shallow and forced to me, the characters aren’t compelling and the gameplay is rigid and dull but by all means I get why some people might enjoy this style of game and its subject. :)
I don’t like myself going after achievements because they are mostly planned to give game more playtime and usually it’s not very entertaining one sadly. Very much grind and cringe :F Was achievement whoring during my Guild Wars 2 times though :D
About shifting i was thinking to play next TimeShift o.o
I used to feel bad if I didn’t 100% a game and spent a lot of time trying to.
Now I don’t do it anymore. Luckily I realized they are not the most important part of a game :)
I still like to try to achieve as many as possible but if I think one it’s out of my possibilities, requires too much time etc. I just skip it.
And I love those achievements who make do weird stuff, look at the game from another perspective etc. more than those grinding ones that require you to beat more times those games that offer nothing new with new plays.. absolutely useless!
really? then I’ll be playing Shiftlings! (need to win it first) =P
I was going after pretty much any achievement i could in GW 2 and must say it was time consuming, my main character has somewhere between 2-3k hours on it. Guess the thing about MMO games being time consuming is true o.o Yes i like achievements which add something nice to game, not just pointless whacking for hours, easter eggs etc :)
I hate indeed pretty much most those replay this game nothing has changed achievements.. just artificial feeling to add more to game than there is.
Did play TimeShift through and it was quite much spinoff from original F.E.A.R game from my view. Good enough fps. Hope you get lucky with it! :D I did buy and give it away though i like co-op games, but have few waiting still for playthrough so gotta deal with those first :)
Yes, I’m agreeing so much. My story with Shift is the same: saw it on SG, sounded nice, got it on Tremor and… err. Regretting that decision quite a lot, really. I have only played a little and probably won’t play any more for a loooooong while, mostly because the frame-drops and general resource munching. It just doesn’t have anything in it that justifies or even excuses that level of poor performance. Also, what’s with that anime chick? Totally unnecessary and pointless.
Not worth the 90 cents. Not worth the 99 coins on Tremor. Barely worth the -1 point on SG. If you win on your first.
I usually like this kind of games but this time I was glad it was relatively short.
Oh, that girl! forgot to mention it.. I questioned myself about her too ¯\(°_o)/¯