Belail's Comments

Characters are drawn and animated nicely, I like the music - fits the feel of the game well. Nice atmosphere bringing together creepy elements and cartoonish characters. Battle time adds a new element to the classic launch game but doesn't really work well for me. Enemys are not very varied and fighting the same battles over and over again is simply annyoing. Battles involve to much clicking and are hence to tiresome for the hands. Something like a boss fight with one powerful adversary with more varied movement and firing patterns would be nice. Plus I wouldn't make the player repeat it if you beat it once. Launch timing should be more challenging. In the present state there is no challenge involved whatsoever. Overall nice game with some minor drawbacks. 3/5

It seems to me that the final score is purely based on how many opium crates you sell and how many crates of tea you ship. Keeping your silver too long only increases the fine when getting caught since it is based on how much you own. Filling the orders quickly increases the demand for the next shipment and which in turn gives you the chance to achieve higher scores. The best strategy here is to buy and sell as quickly as possible and as many crates as possible, also accept less profitable deals, go for the risky ports as well and try to have enough tea ready when the clipper arrives. Trying to earn a maxium amount of silver will only result in low scores.

I really like the unique "stick figure meets real world" style of the Sift Heads series, the selection of music is simply awesome and the gameplay is much more fun than traditional sniper games. On the downside the storyline in this episode simply wasn't very captivating compared to previous parts. A general shortcoming of the series is that sometimes it is not made very clear where to go next and checking all the locations on the map is simply not a lot of fun. I feel it is the weakest installment of the series so far. Also, while I like action packed gameplay, personally I find mutilating a helpless prisoner with a chainsaw not very entertaining. 3/5

It may be true that none of the components are really unique but still the mixture makes for a quite entertaining game. And if you are going to say "dead space" or "event horizon" you also have to say "metroid prime", "H.P. Lovecraft", "The King in Yellow" etc. etc. The artwork is impressive but the cartoon style almost seemed a bit detrimental to the intended atmosphere from time to time. The levels are a bit easy and the controls could be improved in terms of unintended double jumps and being able to shoot in one direction only. Also I would have wished for more metroid-like level complexity. But still a great game in my eyes. Well deserves a 5/5.

Easy solution for Handling: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=1901509