Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://arielek.com/#please-fix-the-road
Price: $5-10 USD
Blurb: “Please Fix The Road is a colorful, minimalistic, laid-back and casual puzzle game in which it's probably not hard to guess… you're fixing roads! In each level you have a specific limited set of tools that will help you get all the cars, boats, trains or animals from point A to point B. The mentioned animals include, of course, kittens, dogs and… pink llamas!“
Off the bat, I read the requirements wrong. They are:
Processor: 2.5Ghz Dual Core Memory: 3 GB RAM Graphics: Dedicated GPU Storage: 1 GB available space
So I tried it on one of my potato laptops, (HP 450 G2) to see if low end gamers can play this. Long story short, you cannot. The part I missed was the “Dedicated GPU”
Without a dedicated GPU, all you will see is paging.
Essentially, what the game is, is a fancy version of a Godot tutorial I once watched , where you lay down tiles, to complete a road so the car can drive from A to B. The game uses assets and I know a lot of people don’t like that. (I think the reason may be that they associate a game by it’s assets, but for me, it is gameplay) The assets are from kenny.nl and I think it fits perfectly. The whole title has that low-poly feel to it and is actually easy on the eye. So I guess we are discussing the graphics first. Everything is colourful, bright and on point. There are no overlapping models, so the road and your car are always visible. (I never once used the zoom out function.) The animations are nothing short of amazing. When your vehicle (or animal) hits point B or the end of the road, it is flipped into the air, some random direction and distance, just to explode into a ball of smoke or fire or shrapnel. This puts a bit of humour into the game from the start. You can destroy blocks that break up into satisfying little triangles, that also have a nice crunchy sound effect to them. The cherry on the cake is the transitions from one screen to the next. There are folds and rolls and slides, you name it!
This is also not one of those games that use the same four backgrounds over and over and just change the layout. Every screen (so far… I have not finished the game, played for half an hour yesterday and half an hour today.) has been a visual delight.
The other part the game heavily relies on, is the music. It is definitely not my taste, but it is fitting none-the-less. It is a slow snare drum stroke with a trumpet playing, interspersed with a piano every so often. A little later on into the game, it becomes a picked electric guitar. There were one or two lively tunes buried somewhere in the game also. This is my only critique on the game. I need an outrun-style radio to fiddle with the knobs and change my station. I don’t mind slow and relaxing music, but give me a choice to get some other slow and relaxing music, or maybe my own music. Because I did not like the music, it grated on me to the point where I turned it off, it is not that it was bad, just not my taste.
The last thing we need to look at is the game mechanics. If the game was simply A to B with your little car, it would get boring really quickly. The developers have used different vehicle models and even multiple vehicles. Some levels have animals that are also humorlessly flipped into the air at the end and explode on contact with the ground. This could also have been something different each time, but it is not a deal breaker. At the end of the day, it is a relaxing casual game, so there is no pressure from time limits or anything chasing you. Some levels require demolishing some terrain before you can build and the blocks do get a little more interesting, a la Tetris, but nothing you need to break your brain on. If you were to apply yourself, you could finish this game in about an hour, but this is for relaxation, not speedrunning, so it looks like about two hours worth of content. If you have the steam version, there are quite a few achievements to unlock. The game is well tutorial-ized and you are taught all the mechanics you need to play the game, in the first few rounds. There is no excessive hand holding, which is good. The game is playable with your mouse or keyboard (WASD) and at the start you are given the option of playing with a controller too.
For the price point the game is worth it for the entertainment value alone. You can play this while you wait for your code to compile and de-stress a bit. The levels are nice and short, (ranging from thirty seconds to two minutes) making it a perfect “in between” game.