Party of Sin

Developer: Crankshaft Games
Steam Release: Dec 2012
Hours Played: 2.4
Similar To: Adventures of Pip / Flat Kingdom / Glare
Rating: 1/5 Parsnips

GAMEPLAY
If you want an example of a game with a great concept and an abundance of neat ideas but ruined by a combination of dodgy graphics, haphazard movement and brutal gameplay ideas then look no further than this Trine-inspired hotchpotch of a game by Crankshaft. Instead of the three different characters cooked up by Frozenbyte, Crankshaft Games cranks it up to seven in line with the number of Christian vices. Like Trine, you generally move from left to right while overcoming an interesting variety of puzzles and killing off enemies who get in your way. In this case, in the lava infested lakes of Hell, these mainly include winged angels who hover menacingly above you while firing bolts and arrows and who sometimes land on the ground to engeage in a melee attack. Levels in the early-game at least take roughly 15-20 minutes.       

BALANCE & PACE
Each character, who replaces the previous one in a puff of smoke, is equipped with a unique and useful power. Pride has a dash; Greed has a grappling hook, Envy has a steaming laser jutting out of her eyeballs; Wrath has a charge; Lust slows enemies; Sloth slows objects and Gluttony swallows objects much like the trolls in Ancients of Ooga. With puzzles involving: blocks to move; switches to press; long jumps to make; high places to reach; torches to light and things to slow down, your job is to work out how to negotiate these obstacles by using your band of merry sinners accordingly. Like Lust's special power at first it all works a charm but soon enough the cracks appear to show. Clumsy animation, balancing issues involving tough difficulty spikes combined with the cheap and tacky looking graphics all starts to take their toll.       
 

PRESENTATION & DESIGN
Let's tackle those graphical issues. There is no doubt about it, Party of Sin just looks a little bit cheap. In the game itself, your character will often float around awkwardly when landing on slopes or where two objects are close together. Similarly rather than blend in with the environment the character always felt like it was super-imposed over the landscape instead. This had the efffect that rather than making solid contact with the ground there was that feeling that your character was on a thin layer of ice. Additionally, although the start-screen does portray the seven characters in a cool and fitting art-style (and I loved the inclusion of the informative bar-chart at the end of each level), I do think the developers chopped and changed with too many fonts and font sizes giving them an oddly inconsistent feel.   

PROGRESS SYSTEM
The game is divided into four themed stages with Hell (6 levels) being the first. You then get Purgatory(3), Earth(3) and Heaven(5). On the map screen for each stage, each level is represented by a small circle on a dotted path. As you unlock levels you can collect three or four hard-to-get apples which you can use in the shop for upgrades. You're also given a best time and may repeat levels. Unfortunately on dying, although the game kindly re-instates your character with full health at numerous checkpoints, you cannot manually save progress. In other words if you've soldiered through a level valiantly but need to exit and get a rest from getting killed 67 times at the hands of a boss - the game will throw you right back in at the start of that level forcing you to repeat all that hard work from scratch! And we all like doing that don't we?
 

CONCLUSION

With such an interesting array of abilities and much promise, it's a shame that Crankshaft got so many things wrong. I may even have forgiven them the cack-handed movement and the primitive graphics engine if it wasn't for the unforgiving difficulty spike at the end of the Hell stage. Here, after managing to scrape through a difficult timed puzzle involving changing through five characters in quick succession I was immediately thrown at an arachnid boss who proceeded to kill me about 40 times but after finally working out its pattern of attack and completing what over 92% of players failed to get passed, I started the Purgatory stage. Did I get eased in gently? Nope, I was immediately greeted with one of the most annoyingly frustrating jumping puzzles I've attempted in a long time. This was the final straw - Party of Sin should go straight into the sin-bin!