Iconoclasts

Good gameplay, good graphics and good music but Iconoclasts shines especially thanks to boss battles. They test your skills acquired durning game and also introduce something new. Iconoclasts is worth playing just to experience those battles.

I am not easily impressed by platformers, even though it is one of my favourite genres, but this one has joined the ranks of my all-time favourites. This has some of the best storytelling I have seen in a platform game, marrying storytelling and gameplay beautifully.

I first played this game when it was a demo on Joakim Sandberg's website, and I'm glad it got finished, because it's very good. The gameplay is fast and fun, lots of shooting and using your wrench to get by puzzles, but the story is kind of meh. It gets very dark at times, and I feel that it doesn't really mesh well with the vibrant and cheerful graphics. Anyway, I finished the crap out of this game and I loved it.

This is not a perfect game. The story is hard to get into for the first half of the game, simply because it's hard to keep track of who the various factions/characters are and how they relate to each other. The level design feels contrived. There are all sorts of puzzles that can only be solved later in the game by backtracking, with no clear indication that this is the case. However, between the gorgeous pixel art, the clever puzzles, the sheer variety of boss fights, and the way the story all comes together in the end, I can't give this less than a 5 star rating. One of the best games on GOG.

... only it didn't love me back. My current progress indicator hangs at around 25% or so, I don't quite remember because I haven't touched the game in weeks. Stuck in another tedious boss fight which is just, for the lack of a better description, too damn cryptic to make it through. Before the introduction of the "relaxed mode" (or watchamacallit) where you basically take no damage, I was stuck at 11% progress. This game is just way too hard for the aged casual gamer, as I would describe myself, although I certainly have beaten lots of classic platformers back in the days. So the main fact why my savegame is lying unfinished is that I simply gave up. It doesn't tickle my interest enough so that I would want to spend another tedious session getting by that "Ash" dude. Don't get me wrong, the game is beautifully executed! The graphics are cute, astounding sometimes, every now and then tripping down memory lane not quite remembering which good old classic they remind me of, but it's there. The sound is fantastic as well. Controls are crisp and the animations are spot-on. From a technical point of view, it is absolutely flawless. So why only two stars? Because when you look behind the still pictures, actually play it for a while, it becomes boring, repetitive and often enough just plain unfair. There are not enough rewards to keep me going. The long, long cut scenes with their often ridiculous dialogues could be reduced to half their length, at least. You can tell a good story without having to run a book's worth of text over the screen. Will that blond girl whose name I already forgot find back her brother and ... what was the game's main goal again? I will never find out. Well, maybe I'll find a nice walkthrough video on the Y'tub some day.