Archive: 2 posts

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Not the best way to start this one off, but I can almost guarantee that the amount of time put into this review is about equal to the time spent actually creating this level. To say the level's duration is short would be about as big an understatement as saying Pixar is a little better than Dreamworks. I'm not kidding when I tell a collective of creators such as yourselves that I literally beat this level in under a minute. I think the most sloth completion still wouldn't clock five. Short. REALLY SHORT. Now, that doesn't mean that RoF is automatically a dead fish floating right off the bat. One of my early favorite levels in LBP's story section was the sled challenge in The Wilderness, and that couldn't have lasted over a minute either. It's okay to have a level that passes abnormally fast like that, but the focus needs to be very different from your traditional creation. In this case, the level design is that you are in a giant spinning wheel with a lot of fiery bits. You will have to navigate a maze within this spinning wheel and the objective is to try falling through the bottom of the wheel through the outermost hole. The main incentive behind the level is that in order to get past the first blockade you need to sit on a race platform, so the object is clearly to go for high score. That race segment is quite honestly the only thing keeping this level from being almost entirely pointless, and it still doesn't stop it from being short. There are a few reasons why the level only takes about a minute. First off, the wheel for it's size rotates extremely fast. The faster the rotation, the sooner your positioning and next available opening will show up. Second, the number of actual layers you need to fall through is about.....3. That's not much at all, you can probably reach the outermost hole in a couple of well timed jumps. And while getting off the outermost layer into the floor is difficult given how small the hole is and that everything around the hole is on fire, the timing for it still not that horrendously hard. I think the major thing that bothers about Ring of Fire is the total utter lack of content, there just isn't anything to this level. You start the wheel, trigger the race, and get out all in the space of about 50 seconds. You then fall in a hole, get you race score, then fall in a pool of water with the endpoint in it. There is really nothing I can talk about here. This level practically defies reviewing by simply not having anything to it. More than anything I need to be objective in my reviews, and that means I hate having to compare levels in the present with levels of the past. However, I really need to throw out Voltaire's H.A.T.E. here. RoF is essentially the same sort of idea as fighting GlaDOS at the end of H.A.T.E., and the worst part is that RoF as an entire level actually has far less to do and explore than just the end boss of H.A.T.E. does, and that level is race for high score as well. Now, I know it's a bit unfair to compare one of the best levels on the network with fresh meat, if I did it all the time everything would seem like **** and no one would be willing to take criticism, but part of having this game age is having this growing system of standards to go with it. Generally speaking, the players expect more of the levels made today to be more complex and better built than levels made over a year ago, so overall the community encourages and actually requires improvement, and I guess I don't really see any of that with RoF. The only reasonable praise I can think to give RoF is the replayability. Having a score attack level that takes only a minute makes for a decent number of retries, people aiming for the highest score all the time and trying to beat their last score. Looking back, maybe I missed the point of this level. Perhaps this whole thing was just a homage to the original score attack levels of The Savannah; that would explain the design and the simplicity of the whole rig, and even the little monkey thing at the beginning that tells you how to start the level. Although at that point I really need to question the presence of water at the end, since the original LBP didn't have water. Oh well. That's about as optimistic as I can be about RoF other than to say I've played worse. I can't even conclude properly, there's just nothing to say. I suppose if the artist reads this, here's what I'd recommend: Make more than one wheel. Seriously, the only thing that was horrifically bad here was lack of actual content, something that might alleviate that would be to have one ring of fire lead into another. You could probably make about 3-4 rings and have a pretty decent level. No joke. Final Score: 3.5 / 10 If you really want to play a classic LBP score attack level, then I suppose Ring of Fire will suffice. Alternatively, you could just play the preexisting score attack levels in the story mode. At least when considered an homage I can think somewhat positively at the satire. On a side note, it's time for school

2010-10-20 17:11:00 Author: Shining Aquas Posts: 353

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If the current bio-flick Walk the Line portrays the craggy country singer as a man wrestling with demons, Ring of Fire wrestles with a really bad case of the cutes.Jackson and Edwards are both Southerners, and they bring a regional feel that imbues their performances with particular warmth.

2010-11-10 11:27:00 Author: kevinchaapel Posts: 3

Posts: 1077139    Threads: 69970    Members: 9661    Archive-Date: 2019-01-19

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