Shiny, the long-awaited indie title by Garage 227, is out on Steam and is coming to Xbox One. Unfortunately, unlike its namesake, Shiny is anything but polished.
Shiny
Developer: Garage 227
Price: 19.99 USD
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review.
In Shiny you play the role of a short, round, battery-toting robot named Kramer 227 aboard an endangered industrial planet. After your human overlords abandon ship, it’s up to you to reactivate and re-energize vital parts of the operation as well as a handful of your robotic comrades along the way.
Right off the bat it’s clear that the quality of Shiny is subpar. In the scripted introductory cutscene there were a number of visual glitches and inaccuracies that may have seemed “good enough” to tell the story, but not much else. The animations were sloppy, robotic appendages didn’t quite connect with the devices they were interacting with and it all just felt very unreal. The same issues persist in the few other scripted moments in the game.
The gameplay doesn’t fare much better than its initial presentation. Movement and jumping can feel clunky, inaccurate or downright buggy. Instead of a health bar, Kramer 227 has an ever-depleting battery that goes down over time. There are also a number of different abilities including a personal energy shield, a jetpack and some sort of heat venting kit. All of these abilities take up too much energy to be enjoyable, and I found myself using them as little as physically possible, often circumventing challenges or collectibles due to the fear of running out of power while using my abilities.
The campaign is rather short and built similarly to a mobile platformer. Each mission has a number of optional collectibles and every few missions the overall environment and theme changes. Shiny sets itself apart from other popular platformers with its checkpoint system and a lack of puzzles.
Checkpoints are scattered throughout nearly every mission and are necessary for survival. While some checkpoints are hidden, I ran into many of them along the way. Each checkpoint has a different number of lives they supply before they stop working and you have to restart the level. I found the number of lives these offered to be wildly inconsistent in relation to the difficulty of the areas they were found. For example, in an extremely easy area late in the game a checkpoint gave ten lives, but in an earlier, more difficult part of the game I was only given three. I tended to kill myself immediately at these checkpoints due to the nature of battery life and the incredibly annoying fact that the collectable batteries, which extend your life, could only be picked up once per level.
Sadly, the issues don’t stop there. The level design is quite boring and there really isn’t much to do besides run and jump. There are no puzzles to speak of, abilities are frustrating to use and collectibles and hidden areas aren’t rewarding enough to seek out. The challenges that were present were inconsistent in difficulty, with some being inconsequential and others being nearly impossible to complete. There were moments that just felt completely unprofessional as well. In more than one location there seemed to be an awkward gap between two floor tiles, a problem which the developer solved by literally placing a floor tile just beneath the other two tiles in what looked and felt like a botched patch job.
The Final Word
Shiny is an obviously underdeveloped game created by an inexperienced team. What should be a cute, non-violent platformer becomes a battle against bugs and archaic controls. There simply isn’t enough quality content here to recommend this title to any sensible gamer, even those fond of platformers. Aside from a nice concepts, background art and music, almost every system in the game is flawed.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
