Mirage (2023)

Horrible controls, utter trash colliders. Cancer at its finest. Avoid at all costs.

I pounced along from one level to the next, and for each "runback" portion escaping the Wall of Bird I died at least twice; I wonder why there are three lives if getting a game over places you back in the same level. Perhaps some arbitrary arcane grading rubric made it so, but I'd think that a game over screen for every time you lose is well enough, and simply don't have it for "trivial" losses like falling in pits or getting hit by bird lasers. The game scrapes out a Land category with its transitional hallways frigerating day to night, but for all intents and purposes it is a pure-bred Nerve mazer, or "platformer" if you're not insane like I am. The music between levels one and two could have lent a clearer contrast with tempo or timbre, or perhaps the level design could have been presented with more of an "arc;" jumping from thin strewn pillars in the outskirts, to navigating a snaking path in the city, to sneaking into a bird party with a bunch of birds firing from everywhere. Imagine making a game that was just the Desert Land from Mario 3. Even within the first few levels there's quite a bit of variety: in the first, the game introduces Goombas disguised as blocks; in the …

"Mirage" is a student project from DigiPen who really should know better. I guess the first thing I would teach game dev students is that 2D games became obsolete when 3D accelerators became mainstream in the mid 1990's, and failing to understand that means failing as a game developer. But DigiPen chose not to teach this important fact to students this year, and in fact told them it would be okay to dump yet another 2D retro platformer onto Steam, alongside literally thousands of these platformers that have no players because nobody wanted them. If I was a DigiPen student I'd be asking for my money back. Do they teach the finance students how to use an abacus??? What do you do in the game? This is a barebones 2D platformer with a bit of shooting... the quality is as poor as the concept. It's not worth playing. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs to pretend they're mobile phones. You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality produc…

I recently played 10 unknown indie games and ranked them from worst to best, this one was 3 out of 10. I really liked the cute artstyle and I liked the music a lot. The only problem I had with the game was that the platforming was somewhat tedious but wasn't a huge problem. All around a cute game with some cool mechanics. 8/10

I didn't have high expectations going into this, I thought it would be another one and done game to spend my time on. You fall through the ground 30% of the time, and it's not optimized at all for a 2D game, I'm barely hitting 30 fps and there's no change resolution setting.

Fire B)