Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Rigonauts Gameplay Review

I play Rigonauts, a ship-building puzzle game from Engient.

The features are very bare, with a linear set of levels, no sandbox mode, and no multiplayer. In addition, there are no difficulty settings that might increase (or decrease) the amount of damage the enemy receives, and you can't skip tough levels, so once you are stuck, you are essentially finished with the game. The objective is to destroy the enemy ship by eliminating all of their weapons or demolishing the cockpit. There is a good amount of components to use (once unlocked, of course) to construct your ship, and straightforward counters to enemy designs. The game rewards using less parts, so those looking to build outlandish designs will be penalized. The interface is obviously not designed for the PC, with extraneous features like a pop-up menu for item placement that is rendered useless by the right-mouse button. Battles are also hand-off, which would be less of an issue if your pilots and gunners weren't so terrible. Placing aim points is simply not enough to make the combat interesting, and the unflinching and unadjustable difficulty makes Rigonauts a very hard game to recommend.