There a lot of games on the marketplace, most of them are copies of others, every now and then you get a completely new type of game. PermaFrost Gaming’s new title Acid Rain is a survival action adventure game that has you rescuing the victims of a volcano and acid rain’s furry. The idea of the game is completely original and definitely a different change of pace for the indie marketplace, but does it have what it takes to be great? Continue reading to find out.
The story of Acid Rain is straightforward. You are a hiker in the middle of Mother Nature’s wrath as she lays down acid rain and volcano eruptions. It is your duty to save all the innocent victims trapped on the mountainside or within its depths. Regrettably, there are a lot of bumps in the road that prevent you from succeeding in meeting this goal.
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The game play is uncomplicated as you run and hide then repeat. As you control your character running through the mountains dodging acid rain and volcanic boulders, you can zoom in and out making the rain pour faster or slower depending on your preference. This would make it a nice change of pace except it doesn’t help in any way. When zoomed in all the way it creates less rain but you unable to guess where the rain is going to pass through. The rain falls from the top of the screen to the bottom making it difficult to manoeuvre without getting hit. You have trees that block the rain, but it mostly is about how fast you can run to point A to B. There was a bug that allowed your character to outrun the NPC’s but this has since been fixed in a software update.
The game also has wild life critters that try to prevent you rescuing the innocent that increases the challenge. You have no weapons, but your flashlight can be used on indigenous creatures in the caves. This cannot save you from a bear in which you are defenseless against and can out run your victims. You usually have to be on luck’s side if you want to save all the 20 people. One aspect of the game that I did enjoy was how you can see where everything is at with your binoculars zooming in and out without a cause in the world. It would have been a better component if you are restricted in its uses like if you were higher up in the mountain to see below not just everywhere.
Acid Rain’s graphics are its high point, at a glance, but while in motion it begins to fault with the lack of finer detail. For example, when you are using a flashlight and you begin to move it around it only illuminates in the direction you move it, but doesn’t move the flash light. This is just one example of how it could have been an excellent addition to the game, but instead it just brings out its annoyances.
The sound track and audio effects of Acid Rain are a mixture of mediocre and occasionally good. The game offers five songs that are usually omitted by the quite annoying sound effects. There are 66 sound effects in the game that do not really help bring life into the game. It is more of an annoyance as you hear screeching screams of people around the map without knowing where it is coming from. The sounds can feel like there are on an endless repeating loop. If there was a pause once and a while with the noises it would not be as annoying. While not all the sound effects are bad, it just seems like too much time was put in adding sounds than improving game play.
Acid Rain is only 80 :MSPoints: and while it is a solid concept and novel idea, the overall polish detracts from the game. You encounter difficult game play, annoying sound effects, and awkward animations that fault the game too much. I recommend a play through the trial version at the least and see if you can live with these issues.
You can find more information on the Marketplace.
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