Rolling Shapes

rollin' (air raid vehicle)

Rolling Shapes is an older game from 2015. It's a venerable 9 years old at the time of this review. It's an old physics roller puzzle game where you roll a ball (and later, other prisms) around isometric maps to get to the target point. As you progress you get access to different shapes. It's very simplistic, and yet it's still assembled very poorly, giving a clunky and unpleasant experience.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The developers have done nothing to adapt the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around the bizarre and never used 1050p 4:3 aspect ratio, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.

This is really badly optimised, despite not even running at 1080p, framerates are consistently below 30, so this is a janky, unoptimised train wreck. 9 years old, they had 9 years to at least try polish the game, but didn't bother. They still want your money, though.

The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality, in some places they appear mismatched... Ultimately the quality of these assets, and thus the overall visual quality is lower than average, and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. Remember, we're looking for the best of the best of 100,000+ games on Steam.

Bewilderingly, while the game includes proper audio controls, they don't work!! So you can't turn off the annoying game audio (it's not very good), you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the game sounds using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to bother testing this basic feature.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Rolling Shapes has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for completing the levels that need you to use the ball shape to roll around, trivial to achieve, but less than 4 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 4 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Rolling Shapes is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Puzzles are trash, game is broken and it's worse than what is being advertised. I'd skip.

I am 32 years old.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing.

Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side.

With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happiness of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay.

After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like.

Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends.

Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together.

Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

Thank you.

It's kinda okayish. Kinda.
But it's also very unpolished and buggy. Clipping and system-heavy just to name a couple.
It could be a good game, but it needed a lot more work.

6/10

ASD

it's ok.

Bought it for 0.38 bucks. Was totally worth it.

‏‏‎

O-kay, never playing that again. I bought this on sale for basically nothing, and I like physics puzzlers and sliding blocks, Rubik's cubes, you name it. The problem is not the puzzles themselves which are varied and interesting. The problem is the game.
Menu navigation and overall look of the game is like something coded in 1995; the sound levels are extremely loud and the volume setting seemed to reset even when I tried setting it down.
The game doesn't support 1920x1080 resolution, doesn't have a windowed mode and I couldn't seem to navigate with the mouse; only the keyboard.
The physics of the marble puzzles took some getting used to, and the game seemingly soft-locks in certain areas with the cube puzzles if you go down the wrong path, forcing you to restart the level.

Even at the current 0,79€, this game is so poorly made that I wouldn't recommend it, despite the genuinely interesting puzzle design.

Rating: terrible (3/10)

• This game is single player only.
  
• This game is fairly short - it took me about 2 hours to get past 60%, however most of the time was spent fighting bugs and replaying same levels due to freezes.
  
• This game contains steam achievements.
  
[*]This game offers almost no replayability aslong the bugs and game crashes are not fixed.

This game is filled with bugs. I got a cube to glide up and down a wall standing on one corner.
Also sometimes you are falling (you hear the falling sound) without actually falling. You can prevent this by pressing the arrow key for each move instead of holding it.
Game menu sometimes doesn't pop up, and you'll have to die first or wait at least 5 seconds.
The main menu would be much better if it was just a list with a few buttons instead of scrolling through each button with an animation.

There is so much to improve on this game!
For me it was just painful to play and quit because of it, luckily I bought it on sale.

This game could be fun, if it wouldn't freeze all the time, so you have to start all over again... All in all it's a nice game, but this fact is so annoying, that I'd like to throw out my Computer sometimes....

Don't be fooled by the trailer. This game is completely vapid and devoid of any actual puzzles, at least for the first half an hour.

The game runs at 40fps; for such a simple game, this should not happen. More on this later.

The first shape you get introduced to is a sphere. Yawn, how boring. A ball-rolling "puzzle" game. We have tons of those on Steam.

The second shape you get introduced to is a cube. Oh, how original; this CLEARLY didn't rip off EDGE.

Furthermore, the levels involving the cube are extremely buggy (you can often clip through walls or get stuck in mid-air), and the 40fps framerate makes the cube move too extremely slowly. Oh, did I mention that the first two cube levels are glass mazes? Because they are. Seriously, dev, mazes where you can't see the walls are even worse than FPS games.

Then there's the infamous Level 7; the cube starts off on a path which gets destroyed by a meteor, and cannot clear the path in time when the game is running at 40fps. Furthermore, while the cube seems to barely clear the path and is standing on solid ground, the "falling off of path" sound plays and the level restarts! This bug has made it impossible for me to progress any further, and within this half an hour of a supposed "puzzle game", I have not encountered a single puzzle that is not a maze.

Add to that the other misgivings in level design (i.e. punishing the player for not knowing something they couldn't have known before playing, or punishing the player for seeking a more efficient solution), UI and options (It's 2015 and you still don't have 1080p as a resolution?! There's no way to rebind keys or skip cutscenes?! Your game's UI is giant and obnoxious?!), and I can safely say that this game is one which I wish to refund. Unfortunately, I cannot do so since I bought this last winter, so that's £3.49 down the drain.

While it's no Journey Of The Light, even May's Mysteries: The Secret Of Dragonville is better than this, since that game actually started off with puzzles instead of time-wasting, buggy messes.

Developers, take note: If you can't show any puzzles in your "puzzle" game within the first half an hour, why would the player continue playing? If your game's first half hour of gameplay is riddled with bugs, what reason do the players have to believe that the rest of it isn't? If your game's first half hour is not at all innovative or original, where is the "innovative and original gameplay" that developers like you implicitly promise us?

All in all, developers, this game is exactly what a puzzle game should NOT look like.

Challenging but unpolished puzzle game.

I played 15 of the 28 levels in under an hour. The game is based on rolling or tumbling shapes (ball, cube, brick, cylinder, ...) through a labyrinth. Where it gets tricky is when you need to color each square of ground, or have restrictions tumbling (low ceiling), or you have time restrictions (labyrinth being bombed, conveyor belt). Some of these levels are very good.

The problems is the time-limited levels that you need to redo at each failure, and because the author likes long introductions (the game starts with a voice mail from space), that means spending a lot of time on these attempts getting past the easy stuff to fail yet again at something that is only revealed when it is too late (maybe a wrong turn in the labyrinth or a problem coming up on the conveyor that is obscured by other parts of the level). On the other hand, the game never lets you get into a new mechanic you've learned by providing a few more levels like it; instead, it prefers to throw a different mechanic at you quickly. Add to that a general lack of polish (changing the resolution always sets it immediately, no way to set SFX and cheap BGM volume separately, mixed quality of art style, getting stuck tumbling down the stairs because the game is using a general physics engine for what is essentially constrained movement), and my feelings about this game are mixed.

If the timed puzzles were optional, and if there were more levels, or if the game was cheaper, I'd recommend it, because I really liked some of the challenges. But as it is, I expect many buyers are going to be disappointed.

Highly polished game, the physics are realistic with a satisfying "feel", addictive challenge, cool graphics and sound.
I hope it does well and more games are made like this.
The game uses a very simple 4 arrow interface and the control is intuitive, it looks simple but the software must have been well developed to achieve this level of realism.
It does have the odd jam up needing Esc key but that is mainly because Vertex have gone the more crazy route of using a complex engine, and it pays off.
If you like the look of it , play it!

Interesting concept and fairly fun. I only ran into a few minor problems with the game itself. The biggest and most glaring issue is a problem with collision. It seems as though when you are supposed to drop to another level, you can get stuck and have no choice but to reset. Besides this, there isn't much holding this back besides the price tag for what you are getting. Maybe wait for a sale.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=457996067