Take the story of an RPG, add a combination of LoZ AND Castlevania SotN and you get TAG! This is essentially a love letter to old school games especially metroidvanias. It also includes tributes to Mario, Sonic, Kirby, Castlevania, Earthbound and more. I can sympathize when my first console was the NES. TAG will brings you back to an era when games were good. It really was a breath of fresh air. First of all is mighty ambitious for a free indie game made by one guy with help. It's big, it's long especially if you explore and get everything, has EXCELLENT game design, beautiful pixel art, awesome kicking soundtrack, great story, tight controls, neat mechanics like the day/afternoon/night cycle and how everything changes with it and I especially loved the magic bottle power-up where you use wind or snow to jump higher. The only bad part is that it does have some glitches and bugs. I didn't encounter anything game breaking either. But for a free indie game of this magnitude it was acceptable and not enough for me to deduct a star. I have played indie games that cost $ and are smaller in scale and still have them. I would pay $10 for it. Seriously play it just for that LSD level.
This is one of those games that have a bunch of little things that add up to become this big downer. It really needed more polish and more testing. There was nothing gamebreaking so I gave it a pass, being an indie title an all. I'll go straight to the bigger and more significant ones. -The voice acting of the two main characters is downright embarrasing and grating. They're not even trying. It doesn't help that Jack doesn't have a personality or charisma and is very generic overall, even the way he looks. -The game's writing is meh. It's not funny or witty or anything like that. The first chapters were started great but it feels the writers just gave up later as the game went on. When you see a generic Star Wars and LoTR reference thrown in all of a sudden you're just trying too hard. You click on a chair Jack says: "It's just a chair." or "Comfy!" -The plot is too thin and superficial for the game to be this long. It's apparent by Chapter 6 of the 13 Chapters. It gets the to the point where you're just running around talking with the same people with the same throw away dialog and clicking a bunch of items in every room you enter to listen to a description like the one above. It seemed like a bunch of filler to me. -Some of the puzzles are inane. On the plus side: -The graphics were nice and colorful. The style was different from most Adventure games so it was a breath of fresh air. Some of the locales were breathtaking. -Music was good but I wish there was more of it, since there are parts where there isn't even any. -In the voice acting department apart from Jack and Amanda the rest of the cast is pretty good. Especially Dr. T. -10tetacle tried. It's still better than the sum of it's parts. If you need to scratch that adventure game itch and it's below $5 like another reviewer said, try it.
