[Crucius]

Hey guys, Crucius from IntoStarCraft here with a review of the custom map; "The Hungry Baneling".

A video alternative to this review is available at our YouTube Channel;

You Tube

You Tube

Overview

The Hungry Baneling is of a similar nature to the game Spore, in which you control a primary unit, and must "consume" smaller units, with the aim of increasing your "size", in order to consume even larger units, later on in the game.

Your mission to defeat the combined Terran and Protoss army is aided by the rest of your Swarm, which is automatically rallied into combat, to fight along side you, or to become your "food".

You must consume units on the field, in order to "grow". These units can be either from the Terran/Protoss army, or the Zerg units fighting along side you. You are restricted to consuming units "smaller" than you, and are notified when you are able to consume new units.

Mechanics

The general mechanics of the game work well. Whilst there is room for improvement, the game works well for it's intended purpose.

The very first issue that can be noticed about the game is that the "Press any key to skip" the cinematic does not work, at all. Skipping the cinematic will cause you to not have a UI to play with; which removes the minimap from the game, making it hard to navigate around. It also doesn't relocate your camera to the correct area to start. For the optimal game play, do not press any keys on your keyboard until your UI pops up.

You are offered with two methods of controlling your unit; mouse controls or WASD keyboard input. I recommend using the mouse, as WASD keyboard inputs resulted in an input lag of approximately 1 second (there was a 1 second delay between the keystroke and ingame movement), in addition to the inability to travel in diagonal directions; only being limited to the 4 cardinal directions.

The ability to toggle the camera to follow your unit around, is assigned to the "Space Bar" key. Personally, I believe the key choice is a poor one, as "Space Bar" is still assigned to the ability to center the camera view, to the latest action; and since there is always units being attacked, your camera view will always jump to another part of the map.

Also, when moving your unit vertically down the map, the camera-follow feature experiences some issue, as the unit movement speed is slower than the camera movement speed, resulting in jerky camera movements. (Refer to video review for a visual sight). Otherwise, this feature works well.

The scaling of health regeneration as you "level" heavily reduces the difficulty of the game overall. After the first two or so segments (which is relatively quick), it is very very hard to die. Because the health regeneration is scaled as a percentile value, and the offensive unit's damage is not scaled, your regeneration will cancel out the incoming damage being dealt to you.

Also, as your size increases, the attack range for units do not scale. As such, in the late game, you can basically just stay stationary, and since all the units are scripted to rally to your locations, units will walks straight into you and your kill counter will begin to rack up without having to do much at all.

With the scaling of your unit size, movement around the terrain may become a bit non-fluid, but by that point in the game, you are close to the end objective; and thus end of the game.

Gameplay

Overall, the concept of the game is enjoyable; it is relatively original, as far as StarCraft maps are concerned. But, because of the nature of the game, and the fact it is pretty linear; it does not have much re-playability value. It is a good game to fire up when you have a few minutes to spare; but as a solid game to occupy yourself with, it doesn't hold much value. Also, it is a single player only game, which means you can't load it up with friends.

Personally, after having played it through 4-5 times for review and recording, I won't be playing it any time soon.

Summary

The game has its positives; It has a good concept supporting it, as well as a relative good storyline behind it. It has been well developed. But it also has numerous issues with it. Most, may be limitations of the engine itself, but most are from overlooking specific aspects of the game. Some of the issues can be by-passed just by having knowledge about the issue itself, where as others cannot be by-passed and overall hamper the game play.

As far as difficulty goes, the game is easy. Maybe even too easy. Once you pass the first minute or two of the game; it is simply cruising from that point on, and enjoyment starts dropping off, and the game begins to become a tedious task of just racking up kills. With changes in how the mechanics work in regards to your unit, the enjoyment could be made to carry through to the end.

Overall, the game does well for it's tended purpose. It is good for infrequent playing, or as a decent way to spend a few free minutes.

Considering all the issues and positives mentioned, I give this game a 3/5.

Again, if you want this in a video format, so you can have a visual demonstration of these issues, check out the video review at

You Tube

You Tube

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