Choo Choo Boom Boom

I tried this back when it came out and ended up dropping it because the controls were too frustrating. I loved the theme, voice acting, and gameplay enough that the game's stuck with me ever since, and it kept popping into my head every so often.

I finally decided to reinstall it today, and this time it clicked for me. While it's extremely hard to target anything with any level of accuracy, that's the whole challenge of the game. It's all about trying to maneuver a slow and clunky gun at various objects so you can shoot them before they kill you.

I managed to beat the game without too much difficulty this time, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

Very fun, albeit short little game. only took about 40 minutes to complete but was a blast through and through.

saying most student projects are trash, while true, wouldn't be completely fair, as most professional and amateur attempts, paid or otherwise, are subpar at best too. this is a short and simple railshooter released on pc, they only had to make sure the cursor moves well enough and clicking shoots. well...

the game doesn't have mouse support. let that sink in. not only is it a pc game, so by default it should have mouse controls at least in the menus, depending on what kinda game it is, but it's a fucking move the crosshair around and shoot stuff game and the fucking mouse doesn't work. only wasd to navigate the menu, arrows won't do, so non-qwerty people can join mouse people on the bench.

they went with a retro look, fine on paper, but not when some of the text is this hard to read. there are settings, surprising at this point, but the font choice there was unfortunate, too pixely. separate volumes aren't separate enough, can't adjust speech on its own. auto fire toggle, on by default but it definitely doesn't fire automatically. maybe it lets you sit on the fire button or something. rumble setting, don't have a controller, didn't do anything. reticule sensitivity also proved useless and unnoticable. some gfx toggles would've been necessary to turn certain things off for clearer visuals.

at first I thought the game can't be paused either but enter (not esc like in every game ever) brings up the pause menu, the only place where non-rebindable and extremely uncomfortable controls can be seen. wasd moves the crosshair, j shoots, k switches weapons, arrows switch tracks, space for the big gun, needs charging. again, let this sink in. one hand on wasd, another on j/k and a third hand on the arrows. what the fuck is this? even without rebinds, why not q/e to switch tracks? have these idiots ever seen HUMANS? they tend to only have TWO HANDS. no need to switch tracks as often as shoot but come the fuck on.

all this and they had the audacity to show this under the credits button: 'see the talented team that brought you this experience.' experience I can't argue with, it sure was, team is anything with more than one person, but TALENTED? the whole team? no fucking way. didn't check the whole credits but I assume there was some sort of supervision, so the person okaying this from the faculty should be fired and whoever said controls are fine like this should not get a degree from this place, nor any job in the gaming industry, including making coffee or cleaning floors. just stay away from games altogether, or rather keep playing non-stop until you find good examples to follow, as hard as it might be. though to be fair, I didn't check what kind of college it is either, maybe nobody has anything to do with games there, which would explain (but not excuse) a lot.

the real bummer is it'd actually be pretty cool if they added mouse controls and fixed up the rest. I liked the presentation, amateur voice acting aside/included (not so much typos in the subtitles) and got a lot further on my second try, but no checkpoints to continue from if you die is another problem. I don't care about the leaderboard, just let me continue from the tunnel or something next time.

cool ass game

Played one game and lost. Will go back to finish the game. I've read somewhere reviews with bad sentiments. I don't know why, this game is awesome (and unlike the warning in the start you can play with mouse and keyboard). This is totally a game I would play 30 years ago at the arcade if it was an arcade machine. What's not to love in a wacky on-rails shooter againt a giant hand that looks like it was imported directly from a sketchy Japanese importer? The game should get more tracktion for the name alone. All in all, a bit confusing at first, surely I'll beat it tomorrow :)