Beyond Blue
I finished Beyond Blue yesterday. It's a casual deep sea diving adventure with some educational value. You can tell it was made for that purpose. You're playing as Mirai who works on a research team studying the animals of the pacific with a focus on a sperm whale family. During each dive you will scan the animals. It's basically the same thing every dive. You swim up to buoys and use sonar signals to find the animals and scan them. Sometimes you check them out up close with a drone that looks like a sting ray. Then after each dive you return to the sub. A thing or two inside might change that you can look at and you can look at all the animals you scanned in a database, and play them back as a hologram to see their movements and behaviors. Then you check out your messages and call your team and your sister to check in with them at the helm before going on another dive. There's not a whole lot to the game and it's fairly short, but I still liked it.
The graphics are not too bad. I had to tweak them a bit to keep them from being dizzying. However, I felt like the AI left much to be desired. The animals don't interact with the player at all, they just go about their business on their own programmed paths basically. Also you're not affected by the environment too much either. You can literally swim through super hot vents or underwater volcanoes without a scratch. I know this is just a casual game where you can't die, but maybe if the character just said "ouch" and backed away that would have sufficed lol. There's no real sense of danger. The controls weren't the smoothest either. Especially when I used the drone. It wasn't the easiest to position it in the right spot to get the scan done. I also would have liked to have been able to use the mouse to look through the animal database. The keyboard made it super tedious. By the end of the game you unlock the free dive mode where you're free to explore the ocean again and scan any creatures you may have missed. I didn't bother filling in those blanks though. I did watch the video clips though about the real research and people that inspired this game. Despite some minor issues, I thought the game was fairly good at what it was trying to accomplish anyway. The ending turned out to be kind of sad actually, but with hope on the horizon. Here's a screenshot. Checking out the Orcas.
Next I'm going to be playing Röki. I don't really know much about it other than it's cartoon style and has a very high rating on Adventure Gamers. Also judging by the title, maybe it has a Scandinavian influence?
Oh, and Happy Inaguration Day! The reign of the orange menace is over! :')
The graphics are not too bad. I had to tweak them a bit to keep them from being dizzying. However, I felt like the AI left much to be desired. The animals don't interact with the player at all, they just go about their business on their own programmed paths basically. Also you're not affected by the environment too much either. You can literally swim through super hot vents or underwater volcanoes without a scratch. I know this is just a casual game where you can't die, but maybe if the character just said "ouch" and backed away that would have sufficed lol. There's no real sense of danger. The controls weren't the smoothest either. Especially when I used the drone. It wasn't the easiest to position it in the right spot to get the scan done. I also would have liked to have been able to use the mouse to look through the animal database. The keyboard made it super tedious. By the end of the game you unlock the free dive mode where you're free to explore the ocean again and scan any creatures you may have missed. I didn't bother filling in those blanks though. I did watch the video clips though about the real research and people that inspired this game. Despite some minor issues, I thought the game was fairly good at what it was trying to accomplish anyway. The ending turned out to be kind of sad actually, but with hope on the horizon. Here's a screenshot. Checking out the Orcas.
Next I'm going to be playing Röki. I don't really know much about it other than it's cartoon style and has a very high rating on Adventure Gamers. Also judging by the title, maybe it has a Scandinavian influence?
Oh, and Happy Inaguration Day! The reign of the orange menace is over! :')