Raycatcher

Raycatcher
Developer:   Thinking Studios
Category:   Arcade
Released:  Apr 2009
Usual Price:   £3.99
Hours Played:  1
Controller Compatible: No
Rating:  0 Star

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I'm getting tired of skirting around the issue and bringing the bad news lightly so I'm just going to come right and say that Raycatcher is one of the worst games to grace my Steam library. I should have just rejected it outright but it's in my final 300 so here goes. (Get the similar QuantZ or Cranky Cat instead.)

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Menus, Progress & Stats

Behold! The Raycatcher title page. Options? There are none! The F12 key doesn't work and there is no option to play the game in a window. You can read how to play in boring ol' Times New Roman text, exit the game clicking "Exit", sort out the "Song Manager" (allowing you to import your own music if you're mad enough and can be arsed) and there is a "Play" button which first allows you to choose one of three difficulty settings. There is a stats page at the end of a game which shows how much of the game you completed as a percentage - and it starts you off at a later stage next time you play. Apart from this there is no charting of progress. There is no pause button. If you hit "Escape" you are whisked to the title-page and lose all progress.

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Gameplay

A game is timed by the thin meter on the far left. With the mouse, you rotate a large circle with coloured blobs attached on the outside. You catch coloured light beams which travel slowly towards the wheel from the peripheries by connecting them twice with the corresponding coloured blob. There are other meters of various kinds that show how regularly you are catching the beams (this charges up your ray-meter which allows you to use power-ups when full) and a progress bar. If you manage to complete the target amount of waves, the whole process starts again and you're given another small circle of blobs to work with. Welcome to Yawnsville!

Most things about the game are just not very good: (1) The default music it comes packaged with is tuneless drivel; (2) Apart from the soundtrack there is no other sound! There are no sound-effects in this game whatsoever giving it a total lack of atmosphere; (3) The mouse control is very sensitive meaning it's sometimes easy to miss some straightforward match-ups; (4) With just the primary colours used, the look of the game is plain dull. Put simply the game just doesn't have any oomph. Releasing a game without sound-effects is just totally unacceptable in my eyes and, really, no extra effort has been made to spruce up the game at all. 

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Conclusion
Although I have yet to compare this game with Cranky Cat, I have seen enough to know they'd be no surprises for guessing which would get the award for artwork and overall execution. This game just has zero polish. With the default music, the game just plays better with the sound off. Gameplay-wise, it's actually not a bad idea, it's just unfortunate that were there a game out there to demonstrate how NOT to make an indie game, then this would be the one!