Hollow: Cook Off

"Hollow: Cook Off" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. Cook Off is nothing to do with cooking (as if it would be any better as a restaurant platespinner), instead it's a very poorly made and utterly mediocre platformer/shooter. The story involves you infiltrating a mysterious factory as a skillful agent. The gameplay relies on shooting, cutting, and floating to create combos. You use four weapons and four pieces of equipment, and none of it is implemented remotely well. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who do…

It seems like an incomplete tech demo with only a half of the tutorial level working. After finishing of some guys you are faced with a pit that has nothing on the other side. None of the other stages are selectable. My only guess is that there is a locale check that my system does not pass because I am not South Korean like the developers. I bet the debugger would be full of "Not Found" errors and that is why the rest of the level does not load. The current programming meta is to hide and suppress errors in order to make the production copy look good and complete (read: it never is - otherwise it would be an archived legacy product). Definitely there is something going wrong with my copy because I do not have the content other people seem to have. Sometimes getting a shorter game is better. This one had some fun mechanics to it, so I cannot really call it a bad game. Fooking gun-levitation-fu. :)

It has weird and confusing, the textures are blur, and the shootgun dose not even do damage