Seeing gameplay footage of FNAF World, and I have to say that Five Nights at Fuckboy's is a better designed RPG.
You didn't mention the overworld all that much in your review (word count it seems), which looks something akin to an old Ultima game mixed in with Atari graphics, and by god is it gaudy to look at. It's something I can't see the mostly young fans of FNAF getting in to.
Also the load times seem typical to many FNAF load times, way too long. Expect with this RPG, you're gonna see more. What other issues do you have with the game that you weren't able to cover here?
The more fleshed out version of this review that I wrote for Steam ended up being around 1100 words, but for simplicity's sake, I'll bring it down to a list:
- As you said, the completely inexcusable loading screens. They seem to appear every time you open and close one of the overworld menus, for instance.
- The graphics of the environments and the enemies feel like something that came from a game sold on a CD added to a video game magazine, back in the year 2000.
- The items you can buy at shops are outrageously expensive, while the money comes in at an excruciatingly slow pace.
- If you die, you are brought to the beginning of the map, regardless of where you last saved. And you have to defeat all the enemies all over again. There are some unlockable fast travel points, but they are few and far between.
- The extremely limited animations. Playable characters get two: idle and attacking. Enemies only get the former, and compensate for the lack of the latter by just sliding towards your characters.
- The overworld environments are very labyrinthine and it's very easy to get lost.
- There is no character to this game. You just keep marching forward and mowing enemies, every now and then coming across Golden Freddy to provide you with some additional Story Bread Crumbs. Or at least that's what it looks like after under 2 hours of gameplay.
Maybe there were some other issues, but this is what caught my attention the most.
Oh, and the fact that aside of the bosses, the enemies don't have their health displayed in any way. That's a serious hindrance as well.
So Scott sucks at making RP Gs and should have asked for help from people who do make RP Gs. Plus he should have really gone above and beyond for his dev time for this game, as his games are pretty short for the most part.
To me, FNAF works better as a strategy survival game over a horror game, as in it's a better game as a different genre than the one it is intended to be. Granted there are things in FNAF that creep me out, but the first 2 games are really good at making you feel you have to be aware of everything to survive.
With this game, there is no getting around the fact it's an RPG at all. No "alternate genres" to see the game as to make it seem better. At the very least, how's the writing?
So, the whole game is like the Sans fight in the genocide route of Undertale?
At least the Sans fight has an in-universe justification for being unfair and frustrating.
So...every fight here is like the hardest fight in another game?
Scott has posted an official apology about the quality of the game on Steam, and is working on a patch to address pretty much everything you outlined here. I'm glad he acknowledged the problems.
"There is no story. It's all drugs."
Oh shit... wow... he's an indie developer actually not only admitting their game has issues (a big name indie dev too), but he's heavily reworking on it and didn't bitch out that gamers have no respect (or some other BS we've heard before from indie game devs that get big)?
I'm impressed really and applaud to admiring to the games faults and that he's actually going to take his time with a F Na F game.
It's interesting that this game turned out so bad. Scott's not terrible at making JRPG style games (The Desolate Hope is pretty good), and that game looked really well done in his pre-rendered style. Shame that it appears this is just a cynical cash in.
@Chewi Arsenic Candy Calling F Na F world a cynical cash in is giving Scott not enough credit. He didn't release the game early because he wanted money, he released it early (according to him) because he had too much enthusiasm during development. We all had something we were working on where we were so enthusiastic that we didn't see any flaws and released it to the world, only for the world to say "this is kinda lame dude,"
I guess releasing things early isn't always a good idea, is it Scotty?
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Review of the initial 21.01.2016 release (some details may not be accurate anymore due to updates)
I must say, I was really looking forward to being able to play as the animatronics. But at the same time I was rather worried, because when I looked back at Scott's previous attempts at the RPG genre, I feared that this game would suffer from plethora of really poor design decisions... and alas, my fears have proven to be real. Very, very real.
The biggest problem this game suffers from is that it doesn't bother to explain to you almost any of its mechanics. There is no tutorial, no help messages... absolutely nothing to ease you into the game and give you some idea on how to progress. Worse still, many of the VITAL elements of the gameplay are outright hidden from you, like your characters' levels and skills. You have no ability to discern what skills these characters have and how they work until you are already fighting some enemies, at which point all you can do is just use these skills and try to figure out what each one of them does.
And speaking of fighting, this is some of the most poorly designed combat I've ever seen in a video game. You see, Scott apparently wanted to include a turn-based battle system like the ones seen in many jRPG games, but apparently he deemed it a bit too slow. Therefore, he designed it in such a way that your characters still behave as if it was a normal turn-based battle... but the enemies don't have to wait until you finish your turn before they attack.
This means that you cannot stop even for a second, and you have to be constantly using attacks and healing spells if you want to survive. Combine this with not knowing what the skills even do, and you get a complete and utter chaos, with everything boiling down to the frantic "BASH IT UNTIL IT'S DEAD". Oh, and did I mention that when a random encounter occurs, you are IMMEDIATELY brought to the combat screen, with no jingle playing or any warning at all? Seriously, 400 words aren't nearly enough to list all the problems this game has.
While this game does kinda intrigue me and I really wish I could continue it, since I really want to know what lies at the end of it, unfortunately the difficulty of the battles ramps up pretty damn fast and after just an hour of playing, I already reached the point where I just end up being promptly slaughtered shortly after entering a battle...
Oh, Scott. *sigh*