Potato Arena Multiplayer Prologue (PC) Review

 

Potato Arena is another Partygame attempt. Similar to Rubber Royale, Potato Arena hasn't released yet, but published on Steam a Multiplayer Prologue for players to try out the game. The Prologue includes 4 of the planned 10 minigames for the launch. Potato Arena got its name due to Potato people being the protagonists of the game. The cutscenes of the trailer highlight this and are also somewhat entertaining. That being said, it's not like the Potato characters would be anything special and ingame you can't really see any difference to the hundreds of other games with supposedly cute mascot characters.

Every match of Potato Arena is limited to 4 players. The game, to its credit, gives you a lot of options, how you want to play. You can play with Bots, in local multiplayer on the same PC, in random online lobbies or private online lobbies with friends. Bots can also be used to fill up those matches, if you got less than 4 humans around. I could play online with a friend, but I had no luck in finding random players. The developers have also been writing about multiple multiplayer issues. It's just the prologue, but it would be important to fix those issues for the full launch.

Before we take a closer look at the Minigames of the Prologue, I would just like to point out, that around half of them seem to have been ripped straight out of Crash Bash. It's not like they are just slightly inspired by the game. It's more of a copy paste attempt. This can only be excused if they are at least nearly as good as the original, which (Spoiler alert) they aren't.

'Crazy Painting' is a blatant rip-off of the 'Pogo Pandemonium' stages from Crash Bash. Players jump on fields to mark them with their colour and have to collect a flagstick to secure points. There are special power-ups to move faster or attack other players. We have seen all of that in Pogo Pandemonium first, just better looking and controlling.

'Water Wrestle' on the other hand is the Potato version of the 'Polar Push' stages from Crash Bash. Players have to bash each other from a tilting platform. Water Wrestle however misses the awesome Polar Bears, the players should be riding upon. In contrast to the original, the controls also feel far more lackluster. The stages in Polar Push were obviously very slippery, but players were nonetheless always in control of their movement. In Water Wrestle movement feels more random and lame.

The other 2 stages of the Multiplayer Prologue are more original, or at least they didn't copy Crash Bash. Calling them unique however would be an obvious lie. 'Funball' is a football stage with 2 teams of 2 players. There is a stun power-up and a barricade item, that can protect your goal for a limited time. Nonetheless, this minigame isn't so great either. Shooting and Moving feel once again pretty clunky. This is closer to some awkward table football attempt, than a real football minigame. 'Water Mill' however might be the most interesting minigame so far. Players are walking on two opposite spinning wheels and have to hit each other off the map with fishes they can catch. It is certainly no 'Kung Fu Chaos', but there is some fun to be had in trying to stay on top of the Mill for the longest time or trying to survive a punch. Nonetheless, this stage is also plagued by imprecise controls, which can give the combat a lackluster feeling.

So let't take a brief look on the other future minigames. 'Nippon Goal' will be another rip-off of the 'Ballistix' stages from Crash Bash. You can only move on your goal line and have to block balls from entering your goal. Instead, you have to shoot them into the goals of the other players. The other stages are thankfully not just stolen by Crash Bash, but also quite minimalistic and nothing we haven't already seen either in other forgettable games, or done much better. In 'Snake Sabotage' you have to try not to get eliminated by fire snakes in a grass field. In 'Slide Fest' players have to run from left to right while avoiding angry village inhabitants. There are a lot of mediocre runner mobile games with similar stages. The cinematic trailer certainly made this stage look cooler than the gameplay looks. 'Cliff Arena' looks like a bad 2D Brawler and 'Dog Fight' seems to be a tiny plane combat stage. The map looks way too small to host plane fights.  The best one probably is 'Ice Breaker', where players have to throw bombs at each other, but also slowly destroy the ice platforms they are standing upon. Nothing great, but at least it looks better than the rest.

 

Result:

The Multiplayer Prologue is obviously not the finished product, but at this point I would be shocked, if Potato Arena would become a really good game. There are some positive aspects here, like the availability of local and online Multiplayer, plus full Bot implementation. Otherwise, however the game is at best mediocre and often even worse than that. The visuals are quite simple and the potato people nothing really memorable. The stages from Crash Bash only make you miss the original, much better versions and the more original Potato levels are rather insignificant and boring. Online Multiplayer problems, clunky movement and weird menu controls without mouse support don't help the game either.

 

3.5/10

Rubber Royale - Holiday Prologue (PC) Review

 

Rubber Royale is a round-based Battle Royale Game, that hasn't released yet. The release date is in fact completely unknown. Rubber Royale is being published and developed by Flashbulb Games, which are known for their previous games Trailmakers and Rubber Bandits. Trailmakers is a vehicle building sandbox game and Rubber Bandits is a goofy multiplayer brawler game. Rubber Bandits is probably also the source of inspiration for Rubber Royale, because they share a similar visual style and physics model. To me it seems like Rubber Royale is supposed to be a Battle Royale spin-off of Rubber Bandits.

Rubber Royale published a Demo in Fall of 2023 and a standalone version called 'Rubber Royale - Holiday Prologue' in Winter 2023, which replaced the previous levels of the Demo with Christmas inspired ones. Since a few days Holiday Prologue is no longer playable anymore (release on the 5th of December 2023, shutdown on the 16th of January 2024). Rubber Bandits used before its release a very similar strategy, with a Christmas Prologue and Summer Prologue as free playable Demos for all players.

Rubber Bandits uses an isometric visual style and is a Brawler Party Game for 4 players with a variety of different gamemodes. The 4 players are trying to rob a bank, but are not only fighting against each other, but also against the security and police. Only one player can be the ultimate Heist Champion after multiple rounds. Rubber Bandits can be played via local multiplayer or online, including full crossplay. The wacky movement and weapons are an important part of the DNA of the game.

Rubber Royale on the other hand is a round based Battle Royale game. I don't want to compare every round-based Battle Royale with Minigames to Fall Guys, but that is probably the game outside of Rubber Bandits that feels the most similar. In contrast to Fall Guys however combat takes a much bigger role in Rubber Royale. Nearly every item can be picked up from the ground and thrown, including other players. The two demos so far only featured 3 different rounds, which were part of every match. The full game is supposed to have many more rounds and 16 instead of 8 players maximum in every match. I was nonetheless a bit disappointed that the 3 levels in both demos were, aside from the Holiday reskin, identical. I would have expected at least one or two new levels for the Christmas edition.

So let's talk a bit about the 3 stages. The first stage is a classic race stage, in where players have to run and combat through a parkour level to reach a goal area. The constant combat possibilities give it a different vibe than Fall Guys Racing levels for example have. I understand that ragdoll is an important part of the Rubber games, but movement and combat nonetheless feel a bit stiff and clunky. You can certainly get used to it and I can't deny that there is some fun to be had, if you stop your competitors from getting ahead. Nonetheless, the gameplay is certainly not going to be to everybody's liking. The second and third levels are combat stages. Players are trapped on small islands and have to battle it out. On the second stage the water level is constantly rising, which brings a bit of tension. Players don't have to preserve their lives here, but instead get points for hitting the other contestants, which is rewarding an offensive playstyle instead of a run away survival strategy. On the third stage players have to first hit and than throw the other competitors of the island. Parts of the island are also breaking off into the sea, which prevents the round from dragging on. The general clunkiness of the gameplay affects Round 2 and 3 as well. These 3 stages are overall all fine, but after a couple of matches you will definitely want some much needed variety, which unfortunately wasn't part of the Holiday Prologue.

Since Rubber Royale is using a classic 3D perspective there will probably not be any local multiplayer, like in Rubber Bandits. Bandits released outside of Steam also on PS4/PS5 and Xbox One/Series X. It will be interesting to see whether Rubber Royale is going to be doing that as well. Rubber Bandits is also, even though cheap in price, a Buy-to-Play game. The player peaks for the Rubber Royale Demo (83) and the Holiday Prologue (144) were significantly lower than those of the Rubber Bandits Christmas Prologue (1496) and Summer Prologue (2696). Rubber Bandits seems to have found a small, but existent niche for itself. If Rubber Royale will release on consoles, with full crossplay and perhaps a free-to-play model, it might have a chance. If it however releases as a Buy-to-Play game, or only on PC, than I am unfortunately a lot more sceptical of its potential.  

 

Result:

Rubber Royale has some potential as a silly ragdoll physics based Minigame Battle Royale. The constant combat possibilities help to differentiate it from games like Fall Guys or Stumble Guys. The game however definitely still needs some proper polish and much more variety of stages. Admittedly this was just a Demo, but I have to judge what we got. Even though I appreciated the Christmas touch on all levels and skins, I was disappointed by the similarity with the previous Demo. As its own game the Holiday Prologue gets a 5.5/10 from me. With the proper adjustments and development however I could easily see the full game becoming a 6 or 7.

 

5.5/10

Slide N' Go (PS4) Review

 

Slide N' Go is a Playstation 4 exclusive F2P Sliding Puzzle Game. If you have ever done a physical Sliding Puzzle in real life, than you know exactly what to expect from this game. You have an image split into 3x3, 4x4 or 5x5 smaller slides. The slides are mixed up and one of the slides got removed. You can only move slides into the empty missing space and have to move all slides around in a way that restores the original image.  

Slide N' Go gives you access to a few hundred different images for your slide puzzles. 3x3 is obviously the easiest variant and 5x5 the most demanding. You can also extra challenge yourself by trying to use less time and moves to solve the puzzle. 

I unfortunately did encounter some technical issues when playing the game. A few months ago on the PS5 I had problems with moving the slides, since the controls were very oversensitive and even restarting the game didn't solve it. Retrying the game recently on both my PS4 as well as my PS5 that problem seems to have been patched, because I didn't encounter it again. I however did get an really annoying 'Internet Connection Error' once again, which makes it much harder to start a puzzle. The Error message seems to pop up all the time and glitches out the main menu. Once you get into a puzzle however, you can keep playing without the issue. Nonetheless, it was pretty annoying, that this still hasn't been fixed after months.

 

Result:

It is very difficult to rate such a simple game as Slide N' Go. I can't really fault it for nothing offering more than its very basic functions, because that's clearly what it envisions. At the same time it would be very unfair in regards to the much more complicated "real games" to give Slide N' Go a top score. Slide N' Go can be a nice relaxing experience for people, who want to calm down inbetween intense games. Puzzle fans might also want to give it a try, since it is a free and small to download game. Everybody else should just manage their expectations. This is more of an occuptional app than a real game.

 

6/10

Blankos Block Party (PC) Review

 

Blankos Block Party (the Block stands for Blockchain) was a Minigame based Party game with NFT's, that exclusively released on the Epic Games Store. That sentence in itself already explains why the game failed horribly. Making a game Epic exclusive is already highly controversial, but to put NFTs on top of it, is a death sentence. Not even the best team of doctors could save such a game. The developers Mythical Games, explained the move for the Epic Game Store, with wanting to use the "chance to reach Epic’s 180 million players who have interacted with the store". Towards the end, they didn't even reach 180 people or even 18 for that matter.

But that doesn't tell us anything about the actual quality of the game. Was it a real loss or just a forgettable misstep? Blankos Block Party has often been called 'Fall Guys, but with NFTs'. I would somewhat disagree with this comparison, since Blankos was gameplaywise actually more similar to games like Roblox. Fall Guys is a big Battle Royale game with different minigame rounds, while Blankos was instead a party game with various individual minigames. Players could win these individual stages, but they didn't gain more than a bit of XP as a reward and there was no overall champion after multiple rounds. The exception was the later introduced 'Blanko Brawl' LTM, which actually did seem to copy Fall Guys. And visually I can totally understand the comparison between Blankos and Fall Guys as well.

Same as Roblox, there was a big focus on players creating their own stages and adding them to the matchmaking pool. We did get such a feature for Fall Guys too, a couple of years after its release, but it isn't the main focus of the game, such as in Roblox and Blankos. There were essentially 3 different kind of stages in Blankos. There were racing stages, in which players had to try to be the first to run and jump to the finish line. In Combat stages players had to shoot and eliminate each other. The third type of stages were vibe collection levels, in which players had to collect the most items within a time limit. These type of stages are not bad, but also not something we haven't seen in Roblox, Core, Crayta or Fall Guys either. Players could bring in a bit of variation, when they created their own stages. That being said it still stayed somewhat within these 3 prototypes of stages, which is more limiting than Roblox and  others, which had a near infinite variety of stages.

Where I need to give Blankos Block Party credit is the open world hub area, which acted as a kind of traversable main menu. We have also seen this in some other games, but it was nicely done in Blankos Block Party. There were different connected sky islands the players could traverse to and explore, while waiting to match up with other players.

So let's talk a bit about skins and NFTs in this game. Skins were sold in the form of Blankos, which were also a kind of digital collectible. The game even displayed them in little boxes, like real life children toys. This was obviously done to incentivise players to collect as many as possible. There were however two main differences between these Blanko NFTs and regular skins in other games.

For one, all Blankos in the game could be sold and purchased on the NFT Marketplace. This is for example, why some players purchased the Battle Passes and grinded them, so they would get the hard to reach Blankos and could sell them for a fortune on the marketplace. That was at least the wish of these players. I nearly pity them. Some of them most have grinded for many, many hours, because they thought these Blankos would eventually become very valuable, as soon as the game becomes popular. Sadly for them this never happened and in 2023 there were barely any players left, so nobody would purchase these "valuable" skins.

Fun Fact: Blankos Block Party shutdown its servers after 1 year of "Early Access" and around 1 year of full release in December 2023. Yet, there are still people trying to sell their Blankos for around 250 Dollars in the marketplace in early 2024. You might be saying "This is crazy" and it totally is. The idea is that you can use the skins of the failed Blankos Block Party PC-Game in the upcoming Blankos Mobile Game. PC-Players were too smart to invest in NFTs, but maybe they can get the mobile crowd. Btw, there were only 3 days between the announcement of the shutdown of Blankos Block Party and the actual server closure. Probably, because the devs knew there weren't many people left to even notice the disappearance of the game.

The other big difference between Blankos and regular skins from other games is, that every Blanko has a convoluted skill system. There was a bunch of random active and passive skills attached to each Blanko. Players could somewhat choose the theme of the skills and could select from a couple of them. The skills had to be levelled up with XP Coins or via the Battle Pass and the XP Coins could obviously also be bought in the shop. Every Blanko had also 3 different Grades, which consisted of 15 levels each. Honestly, this was a really elaborated and in my opinion bad system. It allowed players with highly levelled Blankos to have an advantage over other players in the minigames. You could for example unlock a jetpack, which allowed you to fly. There was also obviously a paying incentive, to sell or purchase Blankos with the best skills on the marketplace. I don't think this whole Skills attached to skins system was a good idea.

Before we end this review, there was a pretty interesting article about Blankos Block Party on engadget.com, where the developers openly admitted, that they didn't originally plan to make Blankos a videogame. It was supposed to be a prototype of their NFT marketplace for investors, but they liked the idea of using players as a proving ground. Engadget therefore compared the game to a Trojan horse into the videogame space.

I would just like to point out, that Blockchain technology can be a great solution for financial transactions, but it isn't necessarily a good solution for videogames. There would be ways to use blockchain technology to benefit players instead of publishers, but they are obviously not interested in using those. NFTs on the other hand simply don't work in videogames. They are not accepted by most players and at the moment are very likely to ruin the game they are attached to. This topic would certainly deserve to be addressed in a separate article, but I will leave at that for today.

 

Result:

Blankos Block Party was a weird game. It wasn't an epic failure (pun intended), at least gameplaywise, but it was also very far away from being a hidden gem. The whole NFT implementation and the attachment of skills to skins was a mess. The gameplay experience was serviceable, but there was no reason why players should have chosen Blankos over Roblox, Core or Fall Guys, unless they were gambling on selling NFTs. I understand the negative emotional sentiment towards this game, but I would rate the entire experience as pretty average. There are a lot of worse games out there, but also a lot of better ones.

 

5/10

Peasant Royale (PC) Review

 

Peasant Royale is a new Medieval based Battle Royale Game, which released during Christmas and New Year of 2023 on Steam.

The developers describe the game as: "Peasant Royale is what all fans of the battle royale genre have been waiting for, for so long. Medieval Battle Royale with up to 50 players on one huge map.

• More than a hundred items.
• Smooth and realistic melee combat.
• Exciting ranged combat.
• Resource management.

Peasant Royale masterfully combines both ranged and melee combat systems... Enter into exciting duels with other players and finally become the last one standing!"

Well... Peasant Royale is indeed a Medieval Battle Royale Game. Melee and Ranged Combat do exist... And I actually was the last one standing in my first match of the game! The rest of the description is just marketing gibberish.

The Visuals of the game are quite simple and the map is, despite having a decent size, way too empty. There are some medieval villages and castles, but they feel completly lifeless and void of many things. In between these places there is also not much to see or discover. The map might be a decent prototype of a pre-pre-Alpha of a game.

Melee and ranged combat does feel clunky. Most players I met were therefore focusing on ranged combat. The throwing spears and arrows seemed to work okay. The throwing axes however were irritating, since you can't see where they were actually landing. The UI however was simple, but got the job done. The gameplay overall isn't terrible or horribly broken, but there is also no real reason to play this game. There are many better medival based combat games out there. 

 

Result:

I think it is obvious, that this game was made by a very small team or even single developer. I applaude their vision and respect their effort. This however doesn't change the fact, that I can't generally recommend this game. Everything in Peasant Royale is too janky and basic to commend the game, but fans of Medieval based games might try it out for a few laughs. It at least has the scuffed Medieval BR charme going for it. Everybody else should rather check out games, like Chivalry 2, Mordhau or even Pirates, Vikings and Knights 2.

 

4.5/10