Big Fish

Lucky me has the dubious honour of writing the first review for Big Fish. Big Fish is an early access 2D top down retro pixel brawler/maze negotiation game. In terms of gameplay it's a ripoff of the first chapter of Spore/the Sparkle series, as you control a top down fish thing and swim around and collect upgrades that give you different enhancements. Following on from the Spore ripoff, in later stages of the game you jump out onto land, but instead of a 3D brawler you get (sigh), a 2D retro pixel platformer stage. First with the positives, since this does have some aspects of being a sincerely developed game. The game runs, and it's not an asset flip. The phsychedelic backgrounds add a unique charm. The quality here is very low, with graphics that look worse than decades older Spore. Controls and resolution are locked and can't be changed, so the game is below standard for PC. Gameplay is weak and clunky, and inferior to Spore/Sparkle. There's a ludicrous cost of $15 USD for the "hour long" retro pixel shovelware. The developer has already dumped keys in bulk into cheap game bundles, which is typically used as an exit strategy used to extract as much as possible from…

Despite selecting "Save and Quit" the game does not save my progress so when I quit the game and play again I always start from scratch.

I got this key from a bundle a long while ago and was really excited by the premise because I love underwater games and ones focused around evolution so the premise was really exciting. I really enjoyed the concept and the visuals are really nice but that's about the only praise I can give unfortunately because more often than not the greatest enemy in the game is the controls. Before you find many collectables to improve your speed you are incredibly slow which I'm sure was a design choice that was probably overtuned but that could he forgiven if not for what my biggest problem with the game really was... The map and game mechanics suffer from huge readability issues and just don't feel intuitive at all so it's hard to tell where you should be going at any given time and ruins any kind of joy of exploration when you're stuck in the same cavern for extended periods of time. Sad to say I can't recommend the game at any price which is a shame considering the potential the concept had.

Took a second to learn the controls, but they feel great and I would highly recommend this to anyone who just wants to enjoy some swimming mechanics and love the passion put into their games. P.S. to the dev, this is your friend from Xbox support