A short but fun experience

The first thing you notice when you start the game is the cute graphical style, and that really got to me. It feels kinda coozy flying around there over the nice little island shooting baloons and stuff. The controls work very well, and looping and rolling around feels really neat. Its a good feeling in short. So after playing through the tutorial I decided to take on the real thing, I wanted to shoot some real stuff.

So, all set for a dogfight, I took my plane to the skies and started killing them off one by one. It took a little effort to get the buggers down, but eventually, and after a few crashes, they dropped dead. So after that, I found myself trying out the survival mode, still thinking its pretty cool to fly around. And after a few minutes of dodging and looping, I find myself smoked.

Well, that was all fun and stuff, but I was looking for something a bit more appealing, like a storydriven chain of events. Unfortunately, there wasnt any and thats a shame, because it would really have benefited this game. Flying around looping and shooting stuff is pretty fun for a while, but tends to get repetetive when you find out that there is nothing more to it. Sure, there is a highscore list and Multiplayer, but why not some kind of missions with objectives and such? At least some more game modes, perhaps an escort mission? Also, groundtargets would have been a nice addition, like flak cannons or bunkers that you could drop a bombload into.

To sum up, I must say that its a great game. The cute graphics and solid gameplay makes this one of the more visually appealing games for GameMaker, but the low content and repetetivity scales down its life quite a bit. I might not return to Verlor Island, but atleast my short visit there was a joyful one. Fred has shown us once again what he is capable of doin with GameMaker, and i really hope that he'll give us a full game experience along with his knowledge in 3D soon.