Armageddon Days 2 First Review -AKH

I'll start like the games starts.

Your introduction sequence is amazing. it sets up the game's story perfectly. I love the disease part - that breath, both chilling and unexpected, along with the ending to the intro movie gets the game off to an excellent start.

I wish I could give the story 4/5 (it doesn't follow you through the rest of the game or have enough of an effect on the gameplay for 5/5), but I can't while the English is imperfect. You always seem to make the mistake at the worst possible place :P although the line "the world was wicked sick" doesn't technically make sense, I like it. A lot. The problem I'm talking about here is the last line of the opening sequence, "THIS IS OUR LAST DAYS". Either make it "THESE ARE OUR LAST DAYS" if you mean more than one day, or "THIS IS OUR LAST DAY" if you're saying that the game is set on earth's last day. Although I think you meant to use "these are our last days". ^__^

And while we're at English mistakes, I've picked through the help menu (and all the other text I could find in the game) and I found only 2 more. The first is "each upgrade stack with another", which should be "each upgrade stacks with another", and the second looks to be a typo, "homming missiles" (homing missiles). I didn't let either of those two affect the game's score.

The Next part of the review is something I've already mentioned with great praise here - the graphics and the sound. I have scored both of them 5/5. I couldn't find a single problem. I couldn't do better than that myself. The sound effects are stunning and well-chosen. All graphics fit with the detailed 3D style and the music intensifies with the level of gameplay. None of any of this would be out of place in a professionally made game.

Penultimate stop, gameplay.

As has already been made apparent, this game is awful difficult. :D By abusing the 2 player mode and using the two ships to my advantage, I made it to level 3, wave 6 and scored 7,689 points [I couldn't make it past level 2 on 1 player and I only scored 5,909 points]. it would be a good idea to have a second highscore table for the teams of 2 (I don't think I need to explain how easy that would be, you just can't use the in-built highscore system). ;) Most of the game's 4 gameplay stars came from it's sheer addictiveness - something very hard to do in a game so difficult.

As usual with your games, the controls are complex and not always easy to remember at first. Despite the fact that for the most part I was remembering the controls of two people rather than one, you could still improve the game play by showing a little help (the controls) on the pause screen, although that didn't contribute to the lack of one star on the gameplay rating.

A suggestion for making the gameplay easier without changing the speed or difficulty it plays at (although I'd recommend playing with that a little): after each level, restore some of the Earth's health (in an amount ranging from 0 to max 25% depending on the level and/or the Earth's current health). There's also the alternative of adding lives for the Earth, although I can see the logic behind not doing that. ;P

The Final review category here is the Interface. I'd love to give it 5/5 but it got me at first, so I can't. Most games with a similar menu (where sub-options appear as you hover over a selection) allow you to access those sub-settings by moving the mouse over to them fairly quickly, but with this game you have to click the menu item to fix the second screen and then move over to it. Although this is only a little problem, it wouldn't be hard to implement using the Mouse Enter event.

Now finishing the review, here are just some extra suggestions to make the game even better than a 5/5:

-More ships (for more variation in Speed/Power/RPM etc.)
-Customizable ship stats using points (an alternative to the above suggestion) e.g. 9 points per ship, before the game add points to stats like speed, strength (power), and RPM to increase the ship's performance in that area.

-- Summary of Scores --

Graphics mark: 5/5
Sound mark: 5/5
Gameplay mark: 4/5
Story mark: 3/5
Interface mark: 4/5

Average mark: 4.2/5
Rounded: 4/5

Overall mark: 4 stars out of a possible 5.