Red Game Without a Great Name Review

Red Game Without A Great Name is a game for Mobile, PlayStation Vita and PC, that’s part of a series, alongside Green Game: TimeSwapper. This game in particular shows difficulty, while also giving you a satisfying explosion of vibrant colours. The game is based around an inventor’s robotic bird, that is delivering mail to different destinations. You need to control this bird, and avoid obstacles to successfully deliver the mail.

I have never felt this happy yet angry at a game in my life. This game’s difficulty is something that proved to be something that you would expect to hit you hard and make you rage quit almost instantly. But with this game, the art style, the music, and in general the feelings you get from the environments really help with the difficulty. The game is gorgeous, as you may have noticed already. Vibrant colours contrasted by the dark and simple foreground that just ends up complimenting the style altogether. The backgrounds have been brilliantly designed, they really do look great. Every time you go to the next level, the colour palette changes and gives you a nice surprise.

As I have already mentioned, the game is difficult. I found that due to the touchscreen controls, it proved to be quite hard to play the game, due to how much you actually block your own sight when you make a move with your finger. Honestly, that is a poor design choice, considering the fact that a difficult game should be based around the puzzles, not based around how you’re forced to play the game. While trying not to rage at the game, I had an epiphany. I remembered that a while back, I decided to buy myself a product that helps you draw on mobile devices. A type of specially designed stylus that works on touch screen. I decided to give it a shot on this, and found that it worked perfectly, and lowered the difficulty ten-fold. This proves that it’s less of the design of the puzzles, and more of a poor design choice for controls.

While that is the case, it doesn’t mean that the levels were poorly designed. While the controls did make the levels unnecessarily more difficult, the levels themselves are actually quite well done, and still quite difficult, even when you’re not obstructing your own view. The amount of variety in the levels surprised me, as after a few levels I found a new type of obstacle appearing, which really messed with how I predicted the level to turn out. As you can see in the image below, there are giant spike machines that crush down, as well as the rotating spike-blades of ever bringing doom. Now what’s surprising about this game is the level of insult that each obstacle sends your way. The giant spike machine-thingies slam down at paces that are different in each level. The amount of times I found one moving slowly, then suddenly slamming down to your surprise, is quite shocking. If I told you that I have never raged at this game, I would be absolutely lying. But while that’s the case, I seemed to keep playing, to see how well I would do in the further levels in the game. Naturally this was because I expected levels to get much harder nearer the end. So far, the difficulty level went from easy to really difficult in the span of 3 or so levels.

The intro of the game was nice. The song used is catchy and uplifting, and also feels quite creepy, but adventurous. It really sets the tone for the rest of the game. Although that’s the case, having the intro play every time you open the game, without giving you an obvious choice to skip it, was quite unfortunate. I wanted to get straight into the game, and it took me multiple times to actually figure out that you tap the screen to skip it. When you start-up the game, you are greeted with a menu with great music, with a few options. You are given the options to either play the game, change your language of the game, or check out and change the options.

For the options button, it only gives you the options to turn off sounds, turn off the music, and a button that takes you to the credits of the game. An issue with the credits of the game is that at first, you’re surprised to see nothing on the screen, when in fact, after looking further you see the head of the bird peeking out from below. From touching the screen I figured out you’re supposed to scroll the credits up, which is very much highlights a mistake in the design as it isn’t exactly obvious without accidentally figuring that out. It could possibly also be a bug, maybe it wasn’t supposed to be defaulted to be like that.

The language menu button opens up options to change between Russian, Polish, Spanish, German, Italian, French and English. It would be nice to have more language options, as the game does not give you that much dialogue as it’s a puzzle game, but then again maybe the games developers just felt it unnecessary to add too many languages to it.

The play button obviously takes you to start playing the game, but before you do that, it makes you choose your levels. There is a big negative for this screen. It’s actually quite difficult to find what level you’re going to play next, as you have to carefully follow the lines to each next level. The music is continued from the menu music, it doesn’t restart, it just keeps playing, which is not terrible, and is okay as you may want to listen to more of the song due to how catchy it is. The art style is also very nice, which is expected as the whole game is pretty.

To conclude this review, I would like to give this game an 8/10. The reasons for these are quite straight forward. The game is gorgeous, when it comes to graphics alone the game is a 9/10, for the genius ability to make simple silhouettes look so great together. But when it comes to other features of the game, it lowers the rating. The ease of navigating through the menus are a little ditsy, nothing really tells you what you’re supposed to do, and the most annoying part of that is due to the level select screen being so difficult to find your next level. Other than that, there are a lot of good features and bad features of this game. I get quite a passionate indie game vibe from this video game, whether or not that truly is the case. Another reason why the rating lowered is due to how a lot of players are hindered by the fact that they hide their own sight when using the touch screen, unless using a stylus.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation Vita code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.