ComixPlay #1: The Endless Incident is a hybrid adventure RPG/graphic novel by (you guessed it) ComixPlay. And it forces me to ask one question: why?
It might seem, to the layman, that comics and video games go together like chocolate and peanut butter. And there are certainly many games that pull that comics flavor into a game. ComixPlay doesn’t bother with that. You read a few pages of what is, if I’m being honest, a less than stellar comic book, and then you play a few rounds of what feels like a clunky RPG coded in Flash. Despite it’s claims, it’s not innovative; for that to be true, they would’ve had to do more to integrate the two.
The story is, as far as I got, really confusing for being so simple. There are times where you get character backstory in the form of a jumbled flashback, and it utterly destroys the flow of the story such as it was. And that’s assuming you just read the comic pages and skip the battles, which is something they just let you do, proving the developers have no idea why anyone plays games like this one. If you’re taking the time to play the battles, you’ll come back having completely forgotten a sizable chunk of what happened because of the fact that you spent several minutes of your life smashing your face into robots or aliens.
A lot of this could be forgivable if the art was good. It is, and it isn’t. It varies wildly from panel to panel, in some instances having something excellent in the foreground and something much worse slightly in the background. The worst part, however, is realizing that they actually did get some industry vets to write and draw this. If you visit, say, their DeviantArt pages or look up some of their other works, you wonder what went wrong here. We’re not talking about lightweights here, this barely looks like their work by what I can find. I may never know why this happened; I am left to assume there was much phoning in, or possibly a lot of unfinished work.
The RPG half of this is fairly restricted. You get 3 formation changes per battle; considering the number of waves you face, this is not enough. There are abilities that allow you to buff your characters, but considering you have one healer on the field at best and enemies never stop their relentless AOE assault, it’s hard to justify their use. You can’t, as far as I know, grind to make your characters stronger; if that happens, it occurs long after I gave up. At points, your healer will be overwhelmed, and you can never deal enough damage to end a fight before it starts to take a toll. Animations are stiff. The best powers a given character has have a disturbingly low number of uses per battle sometimes. In one case, one guy’s power is to punch every enemy on screen. He can use this ability once, while another character can revive a dead hero up to 3 times per battle. The battles are unbalanced as fuck.
I can not, for the life of me, remember a single piece of music in this game. I’m sure it’s there, but it made no impression on me. The sound effects struck me as stock.
The story features little to invest in. The red punchy guy hates the British guy in green. Everyone wonders what crawled up his ass and died. Even with the flashbacks, it’s nigh impossible to figure out some of these characters. Space Inigo Montoya wins points for his rocking porn ‘stache/mullet combo and eligibility to make it onto the side of a panel van; between the unicorn and the wizard, but slightly in the background and maybe holding a crazy space sword aloft.
I really can’t suggest ComixPlay #1: The Endless Incident to anyone. It’s too hard and un-fun to be a good game, and too unfocused to make for a really good comic. If they just wanted to make a graphic novel, they should’ve done so rather than making a game and a graphic novel at the expense of both.
Pros:
+ It’s 124 pages.
+ The artwork can be really nice.
+ Inigo Montoya a.k.a. Pornstache McMan-At-Arms a.k.a. “Gizmo” is objectively the best character.
Cons:
– The artwork can also be pretty bad.
– The ability to skip battles makes me wonder what the point of making a game was.
– Even on standard difficulty, enemies are hardcore and I never felt prepared to deal with threats.
– You get a limited number of formation changes that is significantly lower than the number of Waves you have to spread them across.
– It’s hard to justify the use of buffs against an oncoming wall of steel and aliens.
Title: ComixPlay #1: The Endless Incident
Developer: ComixPlay
Publisher: Mongoose Net Ltd.
Platform: PC
Price: $6.99
*We were provided a copy of this game for review*
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