somegeek's Profile
Stat Summary
- Average Rating:3.9
- Helpful Votes:669
- Reviews Submitted:44
- First Review:September 4, 2021
- Most Recent Review:November 7, 2023
- Featured reviews0
Status:
Philatelist is an indie jigsaw puzzle game inspired by philately where you piece together stamps and add them to your collection!
Overall rating
3
/
5
24 of 28 found this review helpful
I don't mind this game
PostedOctober 20, 2021
Fun Factor
3
/
5
Visual/Sound Quality
5
/
5
Level of Challenge
3
/
5
This is based on the demo.
# The technical side
I won't talk about stability because it's a game built with the Unity engine, which runs well on a variety of operating systems and computer configurations.
# Fun factor
I do like stamp collecting: I used to do it as a kid. I also like puzzles. This game supposedly does both but I think it could use a bit more though it's hard to qualify what that 'more' is. It's like a good start, but we're not *there* quite yet. It does neither the puzzles nor the stamp collecting super well, however what it does is quite okay.
The stamps are not real ones, which reduces some of the excitement for me. It would have been way cooler to see actual stamps from the countries we're going around visiting.
The stamp collection, selling and so on is not fleshed out. Between stamp puzzles you do get a bit of interesting information about the history of stamps and stamp collecting.
It has a weird combination of relaxing and non-relaxing elements. There appears to be no way to remove the timer so if people are absolutely opposed to timers, this game is not for them even though you can buy extra time. Not all puzzles are timed.
# Level of Challenge
There are different modes such as timed/limited moves/rotating pieces and the like. I think the challenge level is okay but if you want a game where you will spend hours on a puzzle, this is not it.
I'm guessing that this game might take about 6 hours to play on 'Normal' and there could be some replay value if you want to try multiple challenge levels.
# Visual and Sound Quality
The music is very chilled out, the visuals are beautiful, the controls are great. I wish some of the other puzzle games had such smooth controls
One thing I really, really liked is that there is support in other languages and it looks like they did a good job with that at least in French.
# Verdict
This is a luke-warm recommend for me. I think it's an okay purchase on sale.
It does not have a carrot-on-stick feel to it but on the other hand I could see myself firing this game up and playing it for an hour or so to wind down after work. There are better puzzle games out there however I would like to encourage this dev and this genre.
I recommend this game!
Find and collect adorable pups as you visit incredible places all over the world!
Overall rating
4
/
5
34 of 38 found this review helpful
I'm a bit on the fence on this one
PostedOctober 16, 2021
Fun Factor
5
/
5
Visual/Sound Quality
5
/
5
Level of Challenge
4
/
5
My review is based on the demo.
I like the game but I also am a bit confused by it. For one thing, the description claims beautiful locations but there are definitely locations I would not qualify as such. Examples are the place with abandoned military vehicles and yet another with an old steam train. Interesting maybe, beautiful, no.
There are also a lot of weapons such as halberds and firearms of various sorts right next to the cute stuff.
The doggies are adorable and the HO scenes are a bit more on the challenging side and there is definitely cuteness and aww moments.
There is some replay value if you want to get gold stars. It seems to be geared more for achievement-oriented/completionist/perfectionist players because it doesn't seem to get you anything else.
What makes me indecisive if I will get this is the fact that it's a CE and I'm not sure it qualifies as CE material. Let's be honest and say that this is a short game even with the bonus levels. Sure, you can try to get all gold stars for everything and perhaps that would take someone some time but if you just want to play it to see all of the content and don't care about how you finish it, it's a bit light in comparison to some of the other games on Big Fish.
On the other hand, this is clearly a well-developed game, first class in quality. It does take up quite a chunk of disk space for a casual game, which I find odd.
It runs very well on a simple MacBook Air with no mouse running the latest version of BigSur.
Do I recommend it? I guess it's a luke warm yes though perhaps it's better to wait for the SE unless you really want to support these devs.
I recommend this game!
Art By Numbers delivers a new set of incredible painting puzzles! Complete incredible works of art and become the artist!
Overall rating
3
/
5
Some pictures seen in another game
PostedSeptember 4, 2021
Fun Factor
4
/
5
Visual/Sound Quality
4
/
5
Level of Challenge
3
/
5
This review is on 3/4 of the game.
I will start out with saying that I'm fairly new to the art series on BigFish. I purchased a competitor's game that is in this same genre and I kid not but at least one of the pictures in this game is also in the other game. Also another picture looks very similar in this game as in the other. I do not know if the two studios are very close or they use the same artists but I was unhappy to discover this.
I think I will stick with one series over the other and this is the series I'll stay with.
Other than that, I won't go into the features this game has because they have been covered by other reviewers.
What I will say is that I was a bit disappointed in the selection of pictures this time round. A few of the early pages have pictures with pretty much the same subject: some sort of animal surrounded by leaves and flowers. The pictures on the later pages save the game in my view.
This game works almost perfectly on a MacBook Air running BigSur. The only issue I have seen so far is from time-to-time there's a small graphics hiccup that makes the screen 'blink' just once. The touchpad is enough to play and this game supports tapping instead of pressing on the pad. This game also is automatically in windowed mode and allows you to tab out. There are no issues with the resolution on my laptop.
Despite my discovery described in the first part of this review, I recommend this game if this is the only art game series a player purchases.
I recommend this game!
Pixel Art delivers even more colorful paint by number puzzles! This series makes it easier than ever to paint beautiful pictures!
Overall rating
4
/
5
1 of 1 found this review helpful
Better than previous one
PostedSeptember 4, 2021
Fun Factor
4
/
5
Visual/Sound Quality
4
/
5
Level of Challenge
4
/
5
I thought I would add my two cents in the hopes that it will help someone on the fence about buying this game. I'm a bit late to the show because it took me some time to get through the first page.
I finally got through it, since like with the others in this series you have to do all of the pictures on the first page before being able to open up the rest of the pictures. I took one star off just for this reason.
The variety of pictures is better this time round than in the previous installment, which was more monotonous and had multiple pictures of ugly piggy banks and children's toys (there was one toy rabbit that was particularly gruesome in my opinion).
This time there are no repeats. The single-object pictures look more interesting. There is only one 'evil cat' picture. In Pixel Art 15 there were a bunch... an 'evil cat' picture is my term for a relatively high-resolution picture that takes ages to do and happens to be of some sort of cat.
Other than my beef with being limited to the first page during the demo, I don't like the fact that it is a little bit slow when filling in multiple pixels in a go. This is probably because each pixel filled is saved at the same time. There is an additional bug where sometimes if you hit one of the arrows just so on the palette scroll bar, you can end up messing the arrows up and you have to bang them around a few times to get things working again.
It seems easier to target the pixels though this time round but I find I still have to use the non-custom cursor.
I wish they would decrease the timer on the multi-fill functionality.
Other than those small issues with gameplay, this game runs perfectly fine on a MacBook Air running BigSur and with just the touchpad. This game supports tapping the touchpad to fill in a color.
This game looks like it provides hours of relaxing filling in of pictures and is thus good value for money. It's very bare bones but if you are a fan of pixel art, you should get a lot out of this game.
I recommend this game!