Red Game Without a Great Name review for PS Vita, PC

Platform: PS Vita
Also On: PC
Publisher: iFun4All
Developer: iFun4All
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: E

That is, I realize, damning the game with the faintest praise possible. But when you share a common lineage with what may be the worst PS4 game ever made โ€” the execrable Basement Crawl (created by Bloober Team, whose subsidiary developer iFun4All made Red Game) โ€” it?s the kind of thing that needs to be said. The fact that Red Game Without A Great Name actually runs without erasing your memory card or frying your Vita kind of counts as a minor miracle.

Of course, it would be an even bigger miracle if Red Game Without A Great Name was actually decent in its own right. That, I?m afraid, may be a little too much to ask.

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Itโ€™s not that Red Game Without A Great Name is bad, necessarily. Itโ€™s got some definite good points. The art style is pretty nice, for one thing. Red Game offers a nice variation on the usual two-toned black-white palette that so many indie games seem to offer, subbing in a nice red in place of the white. It gives the game a pleasantly sinister vibe (not totally unlike what Basement Crawl promised, actually โ€” but that, thankfully, is where the similarities with that abomination end).

More intriguingly, the basic idea behind the game isnโ€™t a bad one: you guide a mechanical bird through short-but-perilous environments by dragging it from safe spot to safe spot, picking up three gears and occasional power-ups along the way. Itโ€™s a concept that seems tailor-made for the Vita?s touchscreen.

The problem lies in the rather sizeable gap between idea and execution โ€” a deep and apparently insurmountable valley, as far as Red Game Without A Great Name is concerned. While it may make all the sense in the world to guide a bird through a maze using your finger, evidently no one considered the fact that fingers arenโ€™t translucent, which means that your hand regularly blocks the path ahead of you. Nor did anyone give a proper amount of thought to the game?s speed; youโ€™re regularly expected to make quick, precise movements to avoid dangers, only the camera doesnโ€™t scroll quickly enough to allow you to do that. It all adds up to frequent, frustrating deaths โ€” which are made all the more annoying by the lack of any checkpoint system.

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Again, I donโ€™t want to overstate Red Game Without A Great Nameโ€™s issues, since its developers have already shown just how much worse things could be. By those abysmal standards, Red Game is Portal 2 of the touchscreen puzzle-maze-whatever you want to call it genre. From a more objective viewpoint, however, thereโ€™s no escaping the fact this is just a mediocre game that doesnโ€™t quite live up to its ideas.

Grade: B-
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