Bionic Bay

一开始我就被宏大又渺小的生化工厂美术风格和各种眼花缭乱的物理反应感动，铁了心要给好评... 但是最后3关的场景设计恶心到我了，抱歉差评送上！ 我敢打赌制作组的人自己都没兴趣重玩一遍本作的后面几关，因为太猥琐太恶心了

More of a mixed opinion, but ultimately Bionic Bay falls more in the "meh" category. It's a very pretty 2d Platformer with cool visual depth and lightning effects, where your goal is to make it to the end of every level by jumping, rolling and also making use of some swapping powers. In a few levels, you also have a time stop power and a punching power, though it's never really explained why you randomly have this power in a few levels and most of them you don't. Which also brings me to my personal main problem with Bionic Bay, which is that there's not really any story to speak of, except there should be because there is a small intro. And after that intro, the only story you get is from random scientist corpses you can find. And then you reach the end and...that's it. Now, story isn't really the most important thing to me in a platformer like this, but the game alludes to there being one, only to never really elaborate on it. That, in turn, kinda made me wonder why I am even struggling through this game at times because nothing really gets explained. Why can you swap yourself with an object? With the device you have, but...what is it? How does it work? Why do you have a punch power in some levels, but not in others? Things just *happen* and it feels a bit disconnected, which then made me not really care. Of course if the actual gameplay is top notch, then who cares? Well...it's not bad, but it's frustrating. Bionic Bay is a hard game that relies on timed jumps and physics a lot. I will say that the controls are very tight, so the former is fine. The physics part, however, is a bit annoying as you can get crushed by objects, or have to move objects in a certain way to progress, and then the physics just tell you "nope". And, ultimately, it doesn't matter because most of the time, the checkpoints are so frequent that you can immediately try again, which negates any challenge and just turns it into frustration because it feels like a waste of time trying to progress. It's a weird middle ground between the game being hard enough a lot of time that overcoming a challenge feels annoying, but also it not mattering anyway because the checkpoint is right there. So, brute force your way through...which then, in turn, makes the puzzles kind of meaningless. The last few levels mix that up a bit by just being harder with less checkpoints, but that poses its own problem and expose the annoyance of relying on physics even further when electric cables touch your shin and kill you, or you get crushed etc. In the end, it feels less like a precision platformer and more like a game where you try to puzzle out how to exploit the physics in a way to progress, which just doesn't feel good. There is an online component as well, with a few extra challenges where you can test your time against others. I find that kind of cool, but from what I can tell, it's just sections from the offline levels. There is a soundtrack, but it's very flat most of the time and doesn't do much to set itself apart. Ultimately, I am not really sure what the point of Bionic Bay is. Maybe that sounds mean, but I genuinely don't get it. There are many other precision platformers on Steam with an actual story, or more interesting and difficult challenges, or a reason for why you're doing (or are able to do) anything in the game. It's not like I didn't have some fun with the game, and it is pretty to look at a lot of the time, but there's more to a game than that. It made me realize that I like my games to be "filled out", for lack of a better term, rather than just being setpiece after setpiece with a bit of puzzle platforming in-between. I finished it within 6 hours and kind of didn't feel like I had a lot of fun, but also it wasn't terrible. A neutral review option would fit here, but it doesn't exist., UItimately, it's meh and there are better options for this kind of game.