Review of Final Orbit

by
, 2025-04-16, 22:45:21, Level ID: 116285948
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says...

w
The intro is easy to skip, which is good and should be standard for levels w/ intros. I don't care for the intro. The actual start of the level is just weak. There is a vague click sync that is harder to follow than just buffering, and it lacks the obfuscation of gameplay to put you on edge even in your first attempt. You're zoomed in for this entire predrop, and I argue it makes the level worse with how much worse the later cluttering feels due to it. The actual decoration here is just sort of alright, but there's so much BLUR everywhere you can't appreciate any of the detail. The only service of this extreme level of blur on what would be a pretty strong background is to keep focus on the foreground/playing space and midground, which is, unfortunately, incredibly bland. I can't help but wonder what the planning was here, because it's too cluttered in various ways to try and portray the "emptiness of space" with how asteroids/debris fly over the player and how the ship's debris is in the background, but there's also not enough to look at in the foreground for the entire part to be interesting. It's not lonely, it's not stunning either, but it feels like that's what Bli wanted to go for. The next part starts switching the background to various landscapes, much too quickly for you to appreciate anything, intermittent with blue constellations with an empty space background that also feels cluttered at the same time. The structuring here is just as empty as before. Some of these flashes are incredibly incohesive between the playing space and the background (the ocean and the bedroom, especially), where there's either very little structuring gameplay made of thematically related floating objects. It's incredible how cluttered the level feels when you focus on the background, but how empty it feels when you look at the foreground here. Then you go into the backwards floating time vortex thing, which looks Okay and lasts way too long. Short cutscene (actually looks cool) and a few unnecessary flashes to match the drums and you get to the drop.

The predrop doesn't produce any emotion here, even though it's clearly trying to; the background paired with these large structures overlayed on top (it does not help at all that you are zoomed in by the way) only serves to make the level feel cluttered. There's nothing interesting going on in the layer you play on, either. The gameplay feels like an afterthought.

Now the drop is actually decent with a few large pitfalls, but otherwise shows potential for a cinematic style like this to be good, and is why I refuse to call anything similar "slop" or whatever pejorative with no specific meaning people put instead of actually providing input on what's causing a level to falter. First, there's actual gameplay that, while not really too unique, isn't boring. More importantly, the gameplay works well with the background here, and the camera positioning lets you appreciate the genuinely good backgrounds and block design together. The decoration of the bottom half really feels like you're at a location and doesn't feel like structures stamped onto a background. You follow along the ground and see a lot of different things in those first two landscape parts. The upper half of the screen is just boring, though, presumably to keep you looking at the background. It feels like a layout was just adapted to fit the creating style without proper planning. The ending is pretty sudden, I'm not gonna jelq an endscreen over actual level that could be happening instead but its a cool animation regardless.

The whole level feels like it just wasn't thought through well enough, and suffers greatly in execution. The beginning parts drag it down too much for me to consider it a good level, but it certainly has some good points, but unfortunately it isn't that memorable regardless. 4/10

OVERALL4/10
GAMEPLAY2/10
VISUALS5/10
DIFFICULTY7/100
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sorry about this gang