Epic Fall. Almost honest challenge.

Preface:
Russian developers of entertainment applications for smartphones are rarely given the honor of being recognized by users. Only a few apps achieve universal success at home and abroad. Of those that can be remembered, the ageless and “evergreen” Tetris comes to mind, as well as the very recent Cut the Rope, which created a lot of noise and entered the top online distribution services (AppStore and Google.play). But it’s not difficult to conduct a superficial analysis and understand that there are few interesting, well-made and profitable applications.

It just so happens that Russian developers from the very beginning concentrated more on applications that make life easier – the same Yandex.Maps or Yandex.The metro is a direct confirmation of this, and not for entertainment.

That is why every new project from Russia deserves interest. The recently released Epic Fall became exactly such a project for me.

“You tried!”.
It https://nonukcasinosites.co.uk/credit-cards/ is worth recognizing that the overall graphical outline deserves attention. The character, the environment and every element we interact with are truly worthy of being immortalized in memory. However, as soon as we enter the game and go through several levels, the feeling that behind all this “cozy” and neat design hides poorly designed mechanics, graphical bugs and rough controls is like an eyesore.
The gameplay is quite simple. We have an adventurer who escapes from the temple and finds himself in a rather difficult situation – he falls deep into a huge cave. It would seem that it could be difficult? You just need to fly down, right?? But not everything is so simple, because before our “flight” someone kindly placed rafters with spikes, stone ledges and platforms moving in the air along the fall path. Our task is to avoid crashing against obstacles using the pistol and the recoil force of the shot. Shooting at a certain angle, we push off in different directions and go around obstacles. Interesting mechanics? I won’t argue – yes. However, as often happens, poor, even shoddy implementation prevents you from enjoying the game..

“Almost fair challenge”
The basic rule that a developer working on a truly “challenge” project must adhere to is not to approach level construction carelessly. The mechanics of the game itself mean that it should be difficult, but interesting. At first it seems that it is so. The levels are not completed the first time, but they do not pose any particular difficulties, and there is a lot of fun.
But then bad level design begins to wedge itself into the gameplay. Which, combined with a graphical flaw, namely poor marking of the character’s texture boundaries, due to which it is sometimes difficult to understand at what point he will touch an obstacle and at what point he will not.
A typical situation is when you are flying and, having passed all the obstacles, you crash into something unknown, although there was no contact. After this, having died, the character blushes for a second, but still returns to his original appearance and continues to fly further, not paying attention to the fact that he should already be flattened on a stone ledge.
I will not deny that in my life I have never completed the notorious Dark Souls without a single death in 40 minutes or scored a record number of points in the famous Flappy Birds, however, I have never complained about problems with my hands. Difficulty should be achieved through complex and “fair” gameplay, and not consist of the notorious crudely tailored controls and terrible level design.

The use of pistol shots as a means of controlling a character’s flight is new and unusual in its own way. But only in those moments when she is free from mistakes. And this is precisely the problem – often, when choosing a direction, you instantly calculate at what angle you need to shoot, but the game decides to add even more complexity, so it refuses to act in accordance with the rules.

Undoubtedly, it is rare for a game to do without microtransactions. And Epic Fall did not stand aside. The game has the opportunity to skip this or that level for a symbolic $0.99. Thus, the game becomes similar not to a game with hardcore gameplay, but to a product with a heavy donation for the wallet.

Final verdict

The game is suitable for those who are ready to donate hundreds of thousands of nerve cells to “Gray Users Foundation”. For everyone else, the project is suitable only as an alternative to Flappy Birds, and even then only for entertainment for 5-10 minutes, after which the game wisely goes on “vacation”.

The only thing that, in my opinion, is a huge advantage of the game is the graphical component.