Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Feb 26, 2017

  This game is such a bizarre combination of amazing, WTF and terrible, I have no idea what it's going for, but it's mesmerizing nonetheless. The story is nonsensical - a mishmash of every pulp sci-fi idea out there! Amnesiac earth scientist on an alien planet, girls with giant... mechs, evil biomancer cult, visions of godesses... And none of it takes itself serious even for a second, with a wildly shifting tone and tense situations interrupted by dumb goofs. The art is weird. Most of the time it's a slightly amateurish replication of a mix between Another World and Shadow of the Beast with not-so-subtle sexual elements, but every now and again there are very cleanly drawn big-breasted anime girls that just don't fit in at all. ...And I have no problem with any of the above. What I DO have an issue with, is just how shoddily put together this game is. Assets are combined regardless of scale, animations glitch and jump around, controls are imprecise and just don't feel right (jump repeats if you hold it down, sometimes you walk up and down the stairs by just walking, other times the game asks you to press a button), collision is weird and inconsistent, scenes transition super abruptly, and the whole time it feels like it's held together with spit and duct tape ([strike]par for the course for Construct[/strike] on a sloppy side for a Multimedia Fusion 2 game). As it is, not everyone will find this game an acceptable waste of $4-$5. It really, really needs more polish. But if you can tolerate the amateurish presentation and enjoy creative weirdness punctuated by anime boоbs and dumb humor, definitely give this game a try!
• gamedeal user

  Mar 5, 2017

  A true love/hate relationship... but worth it if you're patient and appreciate surreal art. Love: The art is incredible and it is evident that the devs are VERY creative minds. Give Salvador Dali a ton of acid, let him watch some Dr. Seuss, and give him a canvas - there is your art direction. The writing is cute and funny without being too much of a meme (has some typos/grammar issues though.) The soundtrack quality is right up there with the visual art; great chiptunes, awesome ambience, and a lot of nostalgic arcade jams. It feels like each song was crafted specifically for the environment in which it plays. Also, anime girls. Everyone can appreciate that. Hate: The controls and keybinds are gross and my controller wouldn't work in any capacity. They are fine for exploring all the cool shit, but horrible for actual gameplay. The gameplay has platforming, really tight timing levels, and bullet-hell aspects but with messy controls it is SUPER frustrating. A lot of false difficulty, in the sense that it doesn't take skill or thought but is just difficult by circumstance. They give you multiple paths labled easier or harder, but they all suck in the end and don't seem to give you more of a benefit for opting to take the harder route. Overall: I think that it was a really worthwhile experience based solely upon the artistic direction. If you don't appreciate that sort of thing and prefer mechanical polish instead or are just really impatient with BS gameplay elements then I would recommend passing on Dogolrax.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 30, 2017

  Short game full of preposterous circumstances and dark humour. Forgiving for those who just want to see the game and reach the end but ridiculously challenging in an 80's Arcade style for those who... just want to challenge themselves really. Strives to surprise you at every corner. A+
• gamedeal user

  May 2, 2017

  Dogolrax has a few good moments at the beginning of the game, but it steadily goes downhill after the first 5 minutes. It promised to be similar to "Another World" but it misses the mark. Every screen has some glaring fault in it that wouldn't even be so hard to fix. The most annoying part of playing the game was trying to control the hero in any section that had momentum. When the player presses a direction, they start speeding up, and when they press a different direction, they instantly change to be going in that new direction, so by quickly alternating between left+right or up+down, the hero will jitter in place, this makes it very difficult to slow down properly. I was initially impressed at the death animations, some of them were quite clever and funny, but there was only a few, once I got past those, I would just instantly respawn at the beginning of the screen. This instant respawn was very nice when at any particularly difficult room, but sometimes, when you die, the last checkpoint was 3 screens ago and they were all difficult. This created a few spikes in difficulty seperated by long stretches of monotany. The graphics are barely coordinated. Most of the time it goes for a look similar to Another World, but other times it's more like a generic adobe flash player game. The game often completely breaks the style by inserting anime style illustrations of girls, and it's only girls. The main character gets a few close-ups and he is not in the same style at all. The control layout is atrocious, the default setup being arrow keys for movement, Ctrl for jumping. But when you pick up a weapon, Ctrl stops jumping and is then Fire. Shift/Spacebar is used for a brief moment, but then never used again. Seemingly random letters on the keyboard are used to confirm whether you want to quit the game. The controls should have been WASD+Spacebar for movement and jump, then Ctrl/Mouse Click for the gun and the 1 screen when you use Shift. The ending of the game is just terrible, it kinda hints at some fanservice, but then the game just ends. It gives the player a chance to play a low res version of one of the screens from earlier, but it's not any better. I say if you are feeling nostalgic and you want something like Another World, go play something on this list https://www.giantbomb.com/out-of-this-world/3030-17483/similar-games/
• gamedeal user

  Jun 23, 2017

  EDIT: My original claim that the graphics were stolen from other games was corrected by the game's designer in the comments of this review. The sprites were apparently NOT stolen from other games, and were simply an artistic direction the designer decided to go with, albeit one that I cannot understand. ======================================================================== Finished the game in 60 minutes. It's pretty bad I must say. What people are calling "a weird art-style" just means that the art direction was all over the place and wasn't sure of where to go next. I don't know if the designer didn't at some point just give up and steal random sprites from the internet, as most of the art in the game is made with fluid vectorized graphics but then ocasionally you see random out-of-place sprites that seem clearly from other games. There are graphic glitches everywhere, the character movement is full of bugs, and although I finished the game, I'm very dissapointed as I was expecting a decent adventure game, and instead was served a horrible early 2000's flash game. What pisses me off the most is how the screenshots in the steam library litteraly show off all the decent art that exists in this game, because everything else in the game besides what you see in those screenshots are completely out of place. For those praising this game: I have no idea what game you played, it was definitely not the same game as me. [spoiler]PS: I have no idea what was up with the anime girls in this game. They seem like they were taken from random internet imageboards and just placed on this game, as they have no connection to anything else and nothing shows the same artstyle as them.[/spoiler]
• gamedeal user

  Jun 24, 2017

  It's a weird adventure game that wastes your time with a bunch of mechanically terrible segments and cheap deaths and still only takes you a couple hours to almost fully complete (you will miss bonus stages 6 through 8. Not even God knows where they are, but it's not like they're fun). Hastily made; many obvious and easy fixes to glitches are missed. The few worthwhile moments are early and missable, though pretty funny. No steam overlay support. No configuration options of any kind. Runs only in fullscreen in what I assume is 1024x720. Some achievements fail to unlock sometimes because of programmer error.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 25, 2017

  What the hell did I just subject myself to? I'd describe Dogolrax as kind of like alternating shots of Wario Ware and Out Of This World until you're falling-down drunk, then building a game out of the resulting hangover. It's cosmetically like Out Of This World and Heart of The Alien, but switches rapidly through different gameplay mechanics every two to five minutes like it's on a massive sugar high. The different game modes are pretty varied; some puzzles, mazes, and platforming segments, and toward the end a number of auto-scrolling shooter levels. Regardless of which game mode, though, the hit detection is an absolute garbage taco with bullshit sauce. It's not a bad experience overall, but it is a confusing one. It made me uncertain if there isn't more going on than it looks like at surface level, with the vague storytelling and the weird plot. Then the game throws an anime-style pinup of a chick with pink hair on screen, and I was like, "Well never fucking mind." It only kept me busy for about an hour and a half, but it's weird enough to justify a recommendation.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 3, 2017

  I went into Dogolrax hoping for another interesting and fun concept like the old games Another World (Out of this World) and Flashback. However, what you end up getting is a frustrating to control mess of a game. I don't mind that the game jumps around to different types of gameplay. That keeps things varied and keeps the player from being bored, but all of the games seem to control badly. I really wanted to enjoy this game because of the art style and some of the ideas, but I had to stop after about the 100th time of being killed from out of no where and/or because of the controls were limiting. This is the only time I have asked for a refund for a game and I hope that says something.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 13, 2017

  WTF I just played? O_o Well, it's indeed a kind of platformer and adventure game and there are absolutely absurd amounts of ways to die. “A Million WTF to Die in the Dogolrax” as told another guy in his review. Including incredibly hilarious. You found yourself on an alien planet with amnesia and without any clue who you are, why are you here and how can you get back to Earth and majority of locals are NOT friendly even remotely and either want to kill you or transform into another monstrosity. To save your nerves I don't recommend playing it with a gamepad (joystick). It seems like character either stays still or runs like a madman and there are nothing in between. As the result you will die and die again not due to lack of skill but due to lack of control. Keyboard allows more precise control with short key presses. Also, game may randomly switch back to keyboard mode. Yes, they have a switch between keyboard and gamepad. Guess what you have to do to use it again? Eeyep, you have to press “J” on keyboard... Have you seen something more stupid? Overall story is very simplistic and art style is not very consistent with all these occasional sexy anime priestesses of Dogolrax everywhere. However, the rest looks consistent enough, so i's bearable. Overall I can't call it a good game. It's average. But it's good enough to spend a few hours in the company of strange monsters and occasional anime girls. So, in case you have nothing else to do you can try Dogolrax. At least this is a game and not yet another asset flip or achievements crapstorm.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 13, 2017

  This is a tough game to review. Over all, I don't think I can recommend the game to most people at full retail price. Currently (at the time of writing), the game is on sale for a dollar and that's an okay recommend just for the weirdness that's involved and obvious creativity that went into the game, but at full price it's not worth the cost of admission in my opinion. A few issues to critique first. The polish and handling of the game on a controller is all over the place. The controls feel floaty and way too much momentum in flying sections, and glitchy in some of the exploration sections. Aside from the controls, the game itself as far as tone, design and difficulty need to be addressed. The game has wildly varying focus, if the devs stuck to just trying to make a modern love-letter to Out of This World, then that'd have been enough. The world, design and creative feel all made the game worth while in the surreal enviornments and bizarre atmosphere. But too many game mechanics are thrown in at random. Flying shooters, flying avoiding hazards minigames, flying side scroller minigames, very anemic top down shooter section, brick break style games. It's a mess, and feels like the devs worried too much about the creepy vibe and exploration mechanics of OoTW would bore players into not playing. Also worth note, is the game itself feels ashamed of what it is. Fourth Wall breaking jokes come in all over the place, and really dampens the immersion of the game itself. It feels like two games trying to be realized at once, a tongue-in-cheek self aware parody game that can lean on shitty design because "lol random" and a game with much more to offer story and world building wise. With some polish and focus, this game series or devs will have a lot of future potential. Just need to really focused in their design. Floaty control feel, unclear hitboxes on both the player character and instant kill environments and nearly every hazard being an instant death scenario don't do the game many favors over all. This isn't to say there isn't good in here. The artwork all around is interesting and unique. The vibe is jarring at times with transition to pretty well done anime babe styles suddenly jolting to a nightmarish alien planet, but given that it's reserved to human characters the stark contrast isn't too bad. Lots of games have characters and NPCs looking noticably different to the ambient style. The world itself is pretty enjoyable to explore, and I'd have much prefered the entire game play like the first few levels of trial and error exploration in an alien world of endless nightmare fuel. The flying sections, brick break mechanics and instant death side scroll sections really drag the game down. If you want to see more from the devs, and I do to be honest, grab the game on sale or support their work by recommending the game to friends who have some cash to burn. But the unpolished state the game is in now stops me from giving this a thumbs up at full retail price. Grab it on sale for a weird, sometimes frustrating but always surreal ride.