Curling

curling is my favorite sport. it's just sweeping on ice after somebody sends a stone on its merry way and I don't like either, nor sports in general, but unlike most, this is fun to watch. free or not, didn't expect a lot here, in its early stages it didn't even have a broom. now it does and by the time release came around they changed their mind about the ridiculous $5 price tag too. there are [b]a ton of settings[/b], which was a really pleasant surprise. audio is fine but not exactly eye-pleasing graphics aside, [b]it was incredibly unpolished initially but weekly patches were promised and based on provided feedback the developer fixed almost everything really fast[/b]. they also managed to [b]break the store with the 1.02 update and instead of addressing it next week if not sooner (I sent a report as soon as the patch came out), they announced the end of development[/b]. now that's commitment, a whole week of weekly patches. or rather weekly patch, just the one. kids and their attention span these days. so thumbs down it is, way down, both for the game and the developer. settings are separate volumes (ui, sfx, music), resolutions, windowed mode, brightness, overall gfx qualit…

while the game is in development and has bugs, dev is working on fixing them when found

The game, in its current state, is unplayable. The game immediately crashes on launch on OSX. On Windows, it's replete with bugs. You can't buy anything from the shop, and you can't use the broom, which defeats the purpose of the game. The left/right controls got stuck more than once when placing the stone. The score doesn't seem to work correctly, as it arbitrarily awards points and then decides the player always wins. This feels like it was written by ChatGPT and never tested in a clean environment.

Curling is a pretty unusual game because it takes the sport itself and mixes it with a roguelike deckbuilder. I am playing through tournament style matches against increasingly difficult opponents, but instead of using the same curling stones every time, I can build a collection of stones with different abilities. The game is also completely free, which makes the whole idea much easier for me to get into. It is a simple concept at first, but the special stones give it a lot more room for experimentation than I expected. The actual curling is kept fairly simple. It is a 2D version of the sport and there is no broom, so I am mainly focused on positioning my stones and working out how to use the abilities I have available. There are more than 50 different stones, and some of them can completely change how I approach a round. I like this because the normal rules of curling give me a clear foundation, while the strange abilities stop every match from feeling exactly the same. Some stones are useful for straightforward scoring, while others give me much more unusual ways to interfere with the match. The roguelike structure is probably what makes the game worth coming back to for me. Ea…