Headlander

I found the extremely loud monotonous tones in the sound effects layer, and all the flashing, to be very unpleasant, and render the game unplayable. The first 30 minutes was also pretty boring. Thumbs down.

I having so much fun with this one:magxd:

Headlander became tedious quite fast. The graphic design is really interesting but the level layouts and overall gameplay leave a lot to be desired.

https://youtu.be/vYmDWJpqUSA Comedy is a great setup but the long empty corridors and finicky analog aiming saps the joy due to poor pacing.

Headlander is a game that leans heavily into the story and dialogue. These didn’t land for me, and all I was left with was a very basic Metroidvania. [h3]Story & Presentation[/h3] I found this game’s story incredibly dull due to its pacing. You start this game as a floating head, and have to go find your body in some spaceship. Half of this game is navigating that spaceship with little motivation outside of that. Your character doesn’t speak, just lightly emotes. That and a super video-gamey guide just telling you “go here” and “do that” is not enough real story to push you to do anything. The remaining half of the game is discovering that the robots on the spaceship you’re on are oppressed and you gotta go kill their oppressive overlord. Technically, they’re not robots, but people’s consciousness uploaded to robots. But, these are 80s robots going around talking like “beep-boop I’m a robot” and making puns. It’s really hard to believe they’re even people. You really just end up not caring about any character in this game. You also have this game dev’s (Double Fine) signature dialogue and humor. There’s a lot of it, and it’s (generally) well voiced, but barely any of it re…

What this is missing in gameplay and mechanics, it really makes up for in terms of artistic vision and design, with beautiful backgrounds and stylish thematic cohesion, managing to blend the sci-fi and 80s styles perfectly. The gameplay is simple but satisfying and while it does become quite chaotic in terms of amount of projectiles, it's still very manageable thanks to the upgrades and way the damage and health are divided among the different colors. Also appreciate how short of an experience it was, so that it never felt like it was overstaying its welcome. A pity there's only 2 bosses the whole game. BTW kudos for the "chess" section of the game because it was very clever.