Venga Islands Review Roundup

Now that the game has been out for a while, it’s fun to hunt around to see what people are saying. There have been a couple of reviews, and they more or less jive with what I already knew. The game isn’t awesome, but it’s decent.


GameMarx: This was kind of frustrating to watch, but enlightening all the same. The players had some problems signing in, and then didn’t really grok the weapons yet. Shooting fireballs at close range is a bad idea. But by the time the trial was up, I think they started getting the hang of it.

The real unfortunate thing is that the main meat of my game is the persistent battle, and you don’t really get that from the trial. I should have added some sort of simulated AI battle for the single player, but I didn’t.




CrushFragDestroy, on the other hand, played the full version: “…Battle for Venga Islands is a fun little game. Watching the map start to fill-up with the color of your kingdom elicits a Pavlovian response, and it makes putting the controller down somewhat difficult. And I’ve never known of a game where that kind of quality was a bad thing.”

ExtraGuy.com says:
“All in all, Battle for Venga Islands is a solid game that’ll most likely keep you playing just to see how much land you can conquer. I’m certain that if some sort of experience-system was included there would be that much more reason to keep playing, but what’s here will keep many around regardless. The game is worth kicking around for awhile. It’s easy enough so that you can throw on some music while playing and the spells are fun to mess around with. Just don’t expect much more than that for your dollar and everything will be gravy.”



XBLARatings.com:
“Overall, the game is a pretty standard twin-stick shooter, but the online persistent world is an interesting concept. A frustratingly steep difficulty curve in addition to only having local co-op holds the game back from being a solid thumbs up.”

This is a pretty funny YouTube review from a kind of grumpy reviewer. Skip to around 5:30, or watch the whole thing. It’s funny.