Like most people who play Steam games, I have way too many Steam games and I spend far too much time playing them. I should be focusing on more important things, like family, relationships, work, PS2 games, GameCube games, DS games, etc. So I recently decided not to play any Steam games for the rest of the year so that I could focus on my other backlogs, and I started with a game that's been on my to-do list for a very long time; Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg.
Billy Hatcher is a very pretty and colourful platformer with a chirpy, upbeat soundtrack. And now that I've exhausted the pros, here are the cons; this game is shit. It's absolutely terrible, and I was really not expecting that. There's a mixture of small irritating reasons and larger problems that plague the whole game, but if you asked me what the single biggest problem with this game is, I would have to say... everything?
As a character, Billy Hatcher is completely useless without an egg, which separately is also useless, so there is something nice about combining two useless components into something which is a single tier above useless. You can attack enemies with your egg by walking into them, walking into them faster, kicking the egg at them, or ground-pounding, which is also how you jump, and to kick off the small but terrible problems the game contains, everyone who has played this game knows the feeling of bouncing up to a higher platform, only for the game to remember as soon as you barely land on the edge that Billy and the egg aren't technically connected at all, so there's a 90% chance that you'll fall straight off again, and you can't even try again because now the egg is stuck up there. The other 10% of the time, you make it up safely and then the egg drops instead.
Speaking of eggs dropping, there are rails on which you can ride or transport eggs, but for added wacky challenge, they have a very low rate of success and most of the time your egg will just fall straight through the rail, which, if it's a special golden egg containing one of the Chicken Caesars, means you instantly lose the level. Also, this is one of those games where you control the camera, but every once in a while the game says "Hold on, no no no, you're doing it all wrong, here, let me try!" and your view rotates 360 degrees in a second as you wildly jump in the wrong direction and lose another life. I should've known when I saw the Sonic Team logo, but it's still a surprise how broken the game is.
But even when it's not glitching, the game just isn't very fun. The objectives are very similar, usually going around the level, crushing enemies with eggs and praying you don't die to a glitch before you make it to the next area, lather, rinse, repeat. And given its Cult Classic status, I felt genuinely let down by how mediocre it was.
It's a good job Okami is next because otherwise I would be heading back to Steam faster than you could say "Not Tonight just came out."
VideoGame Billy Hatcher and the Giant Disappointment
Like most people who play Steam games, I have way too many Steam games and I spend far too much time playing them. I should be focusing on more important things, like family, relationships, work, PS2 games, GameCube games, DS games, etc. So I recently decided not to play any Steam games for the rest of the year so that I could focus on my other backlogs, and I started with a game that's been on my to-do list for a very long time; Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg.
Billy Hatcher is a very pretty and colourful platformer with a chirpy, upbeat soundtrack. And now that I've exhausted the pros, here are the cons; this game is shit. It's absolutely terrible, and I was really not expecting that. There's a mixture of small irritating reasons and larger problems that plague the whole game, but if you asked me what the single biggest problem with this game is, I would have to say... everything?
As a character, Billy Hatcher is completely useless without an egg, which separately is also useless, so there is something nice about combining two useless components into something which is a single tier above useless. You can attack enemies with your egg by walking into them, walking into them faster, kicking the egg at them, or ground-pounding, which is also how you jump, and to kick off the small but terrible problems the game contains, everyone who has played this game knows the feeling of bouncing up to a higher platform, only for the game to remember as soon as you barely land on the edge that Billy and the egg aren't technically connected at all, so there's a 90% chance that you'll fall straight off again, and you can't even try again because now the egg is stuck up there. The other 10% of the time, you make it up safely and then the egg drops instead.
Speaking of eggs dropping, there are rails on which you can ride or transport eggs, but for added wacky challenge, they have a very low rate of success and most of the time your egg will just fall straight through the rail, which, if it's a special golden egg containing one of the Chicken Caesars, means you instantly lose the level. Also, this is one of those games where you control the camera, but every once in a while the game says "Hold on, no no no, you're doing it all wrong, here, let me try!" and your view rotates 360 degrees in a second as you wildly jump in the wrong direction and lose another life. I should've known when I saw the Sonic Team logo, but it's still a surprise how broken the game is.
But even when it's not glitching, the game just isn't very fun. The objectives are very similar, usually going around the level, crushing enemies with eggs and praying you don't die to a glitch before you make it to the next area, lather, rinse, repeat. And given its Cult Classic status, I felt genuinely let down by how mediocre it was.
It's a good job Okami is next because otherwise I would be heading back to Steam faster than you could say "Not Tonight just came out."