Evoland 2 9+

Evoland 2 is a very clever, witty game that is seriously hampered by poor attention to enjoyable gameplay. The player is often trapped in repetitive/tedious/difficult sections of the game (e.g., streetfighting, flyingshoot 'em up, the boss of the anomaly area). The keyboard mapping is very poor for the Mac version, as keyboard combinations trigger Mac OS functions that switch you to other applications -- something they would have discovered with minimal testing. Another annoyance is that the default keyboard map isn't even visible; you can re-assign keys but not see what the defaults are, leaving you to guess and stab at keys to see what they do. I also tried to contact their technical support on this issue and found absolutely no way to contact them through their website. A little bit more attention to playability would have made this a five-star game, but it comes with a lot of frustration, which could have been easily remedied with a few tweaks had they done sufficient testing.

I would have love to have given this game a higher score as I love the story and the overall gameplay. Each genre of gaming is executed quite well and brought back a lot of my childhood. But there are some major issues. Supposedly this has gamepad support but I was unable to get three separate controllers to be recognized by the game and a request for support to the developers was never responded to. And that one little thing would probably have made all the difference. There are some extremely frustrating parts of the game…especially when using the keyboard as your primary input. So if you’re thinking about getting this then try it on Steam where you may be able to get a controller to work…otherwise be ready for some severely frustrating parts to enjoy a rather cool little story and trip down nostalgia lane.