I was bored enough by the end of the second level. Then I died in level 3 and it respawned endlessly in a pit where I died immediately.
What could have been a nice little gem.
I love discovering games it's one of my favorite things to do in gaming and it's a damn good feeling when you feel like you have found a gem hidden deep in the fields. Escape from terror city initially started out as that game but quickly dwindled once its numerous bugs and horrendous camera came into play. Underneath the numerous issues this game has lies a really awesome game that I wish I could recommend to people but sadly can’t.
What is Escape from terror city?
To begin, Escape from terror city is a run’n’gun game that feels very similar to the base levels from contra. You play in a 3rd person point of view where you move your character from section to section shooting down enemies. With Chunky 3D graphics in similarity to megaman legends I love the look of the game and WANTED to love the game itself. It's very fast past, high action and a very short game that will run you about 40 minutes.
So what are my issues?
The core gameplay loop is honestly very fun and takes you back to a more simpler time in gaming but that is honestly about it. To begin, there are an insane amount of bugs ranging from funny to literally game breaking. To explain , the camera is horrendous making you move in very tight spots where you sometimes will have the wall blocking your whole view. This is bad due to the fact you are constantly having to move and jump around to dodge bullets so many times you will be thrown off or quite literally will throw yourself off the map and die. Furthermore, there are times when you clip through the level resulting in game overs throwing you back to the checkpoint. In addition, there were moments where the enemies or bosses would bug out and would just sit there shooting nothing at you. The sad part is it doesn’t stop there, During a boss fight what do you do? Focus a lot so you don’t get it and what do you do when you beat a boss? Let out a sigh of relief and relax yourself. Well you cannot do that in this game because you have no invincibility during bosses so if you clutch out a boss with 1HP left and you beat the boss while it was shooting a bullet at you there is a chance you can literally get hit and still die. This actually happened to me but I didn’t even get a game over or anything my game was softlocked forcing me to restart the whole game. To top it off once you finish the game you unlock a hard mode which adds EVEN more issues to the game ranging from terrible FPS drops since enemies throw more at you and even more mid boss fights where bosses bug out and don’t even hit you. Sometimes you don’t even have to worry if a boss bugs out because there are multiple bosses where you can literally stand in a spot and not get hit at all lol. To top off this segment there are sensitivity issues with the mouse where the game will completely make your mouse fling around during certain attacks enemies use which is extremely annoying.
Bummer
It's a bummer because my initial impressions were good but it quickly fell apart for me and I wanted to beat this game again on hard initially. But after all the issues and annoyances I couldn’t bring myself to deal with doing that task as it would bump the meter of annoyances up to 100%. I would say MAYBE give this game a go on a deep deep sale for a few bucks but otherwise I cannot recommend this game. It has the love and aesthetics behind it but none of the polish.
I love discovering games it's one of my favorite things to do in gaming and it's a damn good feeling when you feel like you have found a gem hidden deep in the fields. Escape from terror city initially started out as that game but quickly dwindled once its numerous bugs and horrendous camera came into play. Underneath the numerous issues this game has lies a really awesome game that I wish I could recommend to people but sadly can’t.
What is Escape from terror city?
To begin, Escape from terror city is a run’n’gun game that feels very similar to the base levels from contra. You play in a 3rd person point of view where you move your character from section to section shooting down enemies. With Chunky 3D graphics in similarity to megaman legends I love the look of the game and WANTED to love the game itself. It's very fast past, high action and a very short game that will run you about 40 minutes.
So what are my issues?
The core gameplay loop is honestly very fun and takes you back to a more simpler time in gaming but that is honestly about it. To begin, there are an insane amount of bugs ranging from funny to literally game breaking. To explain , the camera is horrendous making you move in very tight spots where you sometimes will have the wall blocking your whole view. This is bad due to the fact you are constantly having to move and jump around to dodge bullets so many times you will be thrown off or quite literally will throw yourself off the map and die. Furthermore, there are times when you clip through the level resulting in game overs throwing you back to the checkpoint. In addition, there were moments where the enemies or bosses would bug out and would just sit there shooting nothing at you. The sad part is it doesn’t stop there, During a boss fight what do you do? Focus a lot so you don’t get it and what do you do when you beat a boss? Let out a sigh of relief and relax yourself. Well you cannot do that in this game because you have no invincibility during bosses so if you clutch out a boss with 1HP left and you beat the boss while it was shooting a bullet at you there is a chance you can literally get hit and still die. This actually happened to me but I didn’t even get a game over or anything my game was softlocked forcing me to restart the whole game. To top it off once you finish the game you unlock a hard mode which adds EVEN more issues to the game ranging from terrible FPS drops since enemies throw more at you and even more mid boss fights where bosses bug out and don’t even hit you. Sometimes you don’t even have to worry if a boss bugs out because there are multiple bosses where you can literally stand in a spot and not get hit at all lol. To top off this segment there are sensitivity issues with the mouse where the game will completely make your mouse fling around during certain attacks enemies use which is extremely annoying.
Bummer
It's a bummer because my initial impressions were good but it quickly fell apart for me and I wanted to beat this game again on hard initially. But after all the issues and annoyances I couldn’t bring myself to deal with doing that task as it would bump the meter of annoyances up to 100%. I would say MAYBE give this game a go on a deep deep sale for a few bucks but otherwise I cannot recommend this game. It has the love and aesthetics behind it but none of the polish.
Curiosa via di mezzo tra un run 'n' gun e un light gun shooter
A great idea in the form of a game that just isn't polished enough. The creator seems to have run out of steam earlier than they anticipated, resulting in a bit of a husk of what should've been - both in terms of the quality of its programming and its length.
The locked camera control scheme is really fun, the enemy designs are good and level design isn't too bad. There are plenty of nice touches like some enemies getting staggered when shot and some branching paths in levels that you'd expect from a much more polished game. The movement feels surprisingly nice as well.
Unfortunately, there are design issues like the camera sometimes being covered by your character because it's just too close. It's often set too low to the ground too, making it hard to judge for close the oncoming projectiles are.
The game's pretty rough on the technical side as well. It's not designed to run above 60 fps - controls break, and the game turns into an unplayable, stuttery mess at random intervals. Get a frame limiter ready.
The gamepad controls are pretty rough - you can't properly adjust sensitivity, aiming is pretty hard to control, and there's no cross-gate\axial deadzone on the left stick, which makes movement very difficult.
I hope the dev takes another shot at this concept, with more resources this time.
The locked camera control scheme is really fun, the enemy designs are good and level design isn't too bad. There are plenty of nice touches like some enemies getting staggered when shot and some branching paths in levels that you'd expect from a much more polished game. The movement feels surprisingly nice as well.
Unfortunately, there are design issues like the camera sometimes being covered by your character because it's just too close. It's often set too low to the ground too, making it hard to judge for close the oncoming projectiles are.
The game's pretty rough on the technical side as well. It's not designed to run above 60 fps - controls break, and the game turns into an unplayable, stuttery mess at random intervals. Get a frame limiter ready.
The gamepad controls are pretty rough - you can't properly adjust sensitivity, aiming is pretty hard to control, and there's no cross-gate\axial deadzone on the left stick, which makes movement very difficult.
I hope the dev takes another shot at this concept, with more resources this time.
So bad it looped back to being a decent trip. The camera is not your friend