Meltopia
I normally love this kind of thing, but what a massive waste of time. Starts off great but quickly loses momentum with some bad design decisions. The flamethrowing is great and feels fun; it's why people buy the game. Half an hour in, your flamethrower gets replaced with a "Tesla gun", which is a lot slower and a LOT more expensive to upgrade, which you have to use for "blue ice". It makes no sense, and grinds progression to a halt. It's less fun, and is the only new weapon in the game that you'll use for the next 4 hours. The game turns into many winding tunnels and just a "have I been here before and melted all the walls?", gets dull, and is very buggy.
Pros
- Melting snow to progress is fun, although they should have spent some more time fine tuning that. Melting doesn't work properly while you're moving the mouse
- When you upgrade your gun, there's a really nice animation for bolting on new pieces
Cons / bugs
- Why is there a dedicated "Fill Energy" station, when the "Buy Items" station also has a refuel option?
- Sometimes when I freeze, I die. Most of the time I just stay freezing and don't die
- The final upgrade is... a shovel.
- It's unclear when the game is actually meant to end. The progression path isn't linear, and I'm kind of fed up just running around tunnels looking for a wall I haven't melted yet.
Bugs
- "I'm Stuck" sends you back to base with all resources with no penalty, and the button re-activates every time you reload
- If you do ever die, every time you pick up a resource, it's detected as a "new resource" again
- Spelling mistakes
- "Upgrade stove" appears when you don't have anything to upgrade it with
- Sometimes the run button changes from "switch" to "hold"
- The game crashed during the credits. Typical.