Sparkle 2 Evo... just a Flow clone?
Many people say and think this is a Flow clone, I personally have never played Flow, nor have I watchedSparkle 2 Evo... just a Flow clone?
Many people say and think this is a Flow clone, I personally have never played Flow, nor have I watched videos so that will not be influencing this review.
Sparkle 2 Evo is about a three hour long game, where you control a microorganism where your goal is to eat to evolve. What you evolve into depends on WHAT you eat, so eating red makes you a carnivore, blue an omnivore, and green an herbivore. Depending on which of the three you become you get special little extra stats, for example the carnivore being the fastest. What you eat ranges from bits of food floating around, to giant squids fifty times your size. Also each animal you eat requires a specific tactic to beat, for example using the tactic that’s used on a glass squid wouldn’t work on a skeleton, which makes the latter levels in the game more interesting, and creates some great, well thought out boss battles. There’s also an GenLab, so you can see which of the three traits you use the most, and what your current bonuses are (developers said you can use the lab to change your creature, leading to people believing your supposed to do it in the GenLab, but they were more getting at the fact that you can change your creature based on what you eat). There’s also a competitive mode where you try to eat more than the opposing AI, fun but not to interesting.
Allot of complaints come from this game 'not looking good' or being pixelated, and not having the option to change resolutions. Well don’t listen to those, because you can adjust resolutions, and it can look damn near perfect on the highest settings. With that having been said, the visuals are beautiful, absolutely just full of vibrant colors, and this may actually be my favorite part of this game. Various corals, and other large debris define the maps, and change depending on the depths of the levels, and location, which I think can be really good at times. The music, well, isn’t amazing. It’s not BAD, but could have used a little more variety.
Now for the problems, this game is buggy as heck. One of the more infamous glitches causes you to not be able to progress any further on a boss battle you just spent eight minutes trying to beat, forcing you to restart, and possibly having you do it a third time. Another major bug was a missing species that was required to be killed for an achievement, but recently this has been patched. The last bug I’m going to mention is when the keys stop working. Yes, they completely stop, even when you exit to the main menu and the level reloaded, they still won’t work, forcing you to shut down the game and restart it. And the biggest problem in the game, you can’t be hurt. Did a creature ten times your size just bite you? Well, better throw you up towards the surface then. This completely removes any urgency in the game, making it more boring than it should be (entertaining nonetheless).
Pros:
beautiful visuals
complex evolution system
good boss battles (sometimes boring though)
Cons:
bugs, glitches, etc.
controls are… off
your “compass” is confusing at first
cant take damage
I would recommend waiting for this game to go on sale (as it often does) if you get it.
Score: 5/10
Score (if the three mentioned bugs were removed): 7/10… Expand