Sparkle ZERO

You could easily mistake this product for a .io or browser game due to its monotonous gameplay and short-term achievements. Of course, the visuals were endearing yet began to depreciate as each level began to simply repeat the least with little to no difference—just an obstacle for the player to surpass in mass and optionally eat. Sparkle ZERO focused on having this sort of esoteric serenity to it, but its overall execution makes it function no better than a screensaver and look no worse than a technology demonstration.

If you aren't familiar with this series. It consists of 3 games and this one is the last installment. I'm really not sure why they named this one "Zero" and the first game "Sparkle 2 Evo" like do these people not know how to count? Way to confuse new players.

Anyways lets get to the game itself. Sparkle Zero is absolutely a terrible game. It has good things about it. But its just not enough to justify the bad. Its nowhere near great like the first two games in the series. This one just looks and plays like garbage. The soundtrack is nice like all of the sparkle games. So that's a plus i suppose.

Unfortunately i cant recommend this game to anyone. But I can highly recommend the predecessors Sparkle 2 Evo and Sparkle 3 Genesis. These are very nice games and what made them great was stripped from Sparkle Zero. The original developers called Forever Entertainment didn't actually develop Sparkle Zero. Instead a new team called MMEU did which could explain a lot.

Another uninventive, mundane and shallow game in the series, this time stripped of even the small variety the prior game attempted, in exchange of translucent colorless visuals.

2.9/10

This game is really easy to complete. If you have very sensitive eyes or epilepsy, I would not recommend you play this game, as every now and then the screen will "pulse" and the explosions are really bright. Other than that I really enjoyed the game and it was really fascinating and beautiful to play. As this game does not have a tutorial, it takes a while to get the controls, but once you figure out the controls, it's really easy to play.

You swim, you eat everything, you grow, you get all the achievements, you just spent 90 minutes of relaxed gameplay, you let the game running to get remaining cards to drop. The end. Recommended only if on sale.

[quote]THRASH: Sparkle Zero wants to be a cyberpunk bacteria simulation descending into a monolithic dystopia. Just like its siblings, it's too shallow, unplayable and overwhelmed with design mistakes. Click here to follow the curator: GEM or THRASH[/quote]
Full review:
Following is the full review Sparkle Zero (2016), the third and the final installation in Sparkle Series.

• Click here to read our review of Sparkle 2 Evo (2011), the first game in the series.
  
[*]Click here to read our review of Sparkle 3 Genesis (2015), the second game in the series.

Sparkle Zero, published in 2016, is the final game in the franchise. It's quickly distinguished from its siblings by its monolithic, black & white aesthetic. Its environment is cybernated, and the creature features machine-like, robotic movements, making Sparkle Zero almost a cyberpunk bacteria simulation.

Sparkle Zero, in contrast to its siblings, has no quests or levels, lacks a macro narrative and its evolution is completely automated with zero input from the player. It's theoretically an open-world design, with a whirl appearing somewhere on the map once you eat enough stuff to tell you it's okay to swim deeper.

These would've been more than fine if Sparkle Zero hadn't suffered from the exact same mistakes of Sparkle 3 Genesis: an incomprehensible cooldown time for eating, and intolerable movement mechanics haunt you in your every step. On top of that, growth is almost infinite but you can't zoom out to see your creature completely.

The eating and movement mechanics seem to be exact copies of the ones in Sparkle 3 Genesis, which we reviewed in detail here. To shortly recreate:

The eating is the only thing you do in this subgenre, so it should be satisfying and the whole point of playing it; but it's a chore in Sparkle Zero (and 3). The movement is cancerous in design. It's not predictable nor precise; it's heavy, thick, dense, and hard to control, which makes chasing food a tedious and irksome task. It becomes more tragic when you take in the fact that the food in the entire Sparkle Series are static, they stand still, and somehow it's harder to eat them than in flOw whose food dynamically moved around you. What's suprising is that all these are in contast to its predecessor Sparkle 2 Evo, whose movement was fun, fast-paced and paved the way for satisfaction. Breaking something they successfully designed 4 years ago is an odd choice for the developer company, and it's hard to figure out why or how they did it.

In Sparkle Zero (and 3), there is a significant cooldown for eating food: after you eat one piece, you have to wait for approximately 1 second to be able to eat another piece. The cooldown is unacceptably long: It interrupts and even breaks the coherence of gameplay to the extent that it's simply unplayable. This cooldown was also the case for flOw but it was short enough to tolerate, or perhaps it stands out here because the Spark's food are static unlike flOw's. This, combined with the questionably brusque movement mechanics, takes all joy out of eating, rendering the whole point of the game meaningless.

Ultimately, Sparkle 3 Genesis and Sparkle Zero are massive failures, leaving Sparkle 2 Evo as the sole option to get a taste of the series.

Sparkle ZERO

Pros:
+ Achievements & Perfect Game
+ Enjoyed the Visuals and Sounds

Cons:
- Short
- No Replayability Value
- Repetitive
- Overpriced

Review
Sparkle ZERO is a game where you start off as a small organism, eat a bunch of smaller things, and become the biggest organism. I enjoy these types of games, but Sparkle ZERO was lacking. There's a small variety of other organisms, but not enough to be that fascinating. All you do is go around and eat small orbs until you get big enough to win the game. There's two ways for this game to be better. Either have more types of organisms or allow you to evolve the way you want to. The visuals and sounds are cool, but besides that this game doesn't have much to offer. I would only recommend this if it was on sale by ninety percent or to achievement hunters.

This was Curated for PC Beta Gaming if you would like to follow us the link is below:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/PC-BetaG#curation

This review is just my opinion. If you liked this review please give it a thumbs up. Thank you for reading my review. If you would like to see more of my reviews the link is below:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198120632907/recommended/?p=1

Fun and colourful and the art style is good. The game is repeatative and there is not much gameplay mechanics though but I still enjoyed 2-3 hours playing it. :) Buy it on sales :D

Ok, now they're not even trying.
I'm not going to give a formal review with this one since it doesn't deserve it.

Sparkle Zero is the third installment of the Sparkle series made by Forever Entertainment.
Oh, it's definitely a Zero, that's for sure.

The problem here is that this game isn't even a knockoff, it's a blatant ripoff of flOw.
I don't need to go into specific details, it is literally copying flOw word for word.
It even copies flOw's visual style of white lines and circles.

The objective is as simple as it can be: Beat the final boss and reach the maximum level.

This game disrespects Forever Entertainment's reputation as a company, their previous Sparkle installments, and most importantly, the creators of flOw and their fans.
Sparkle 2 had enough to stand on its own because it had an immersive feeling of exploration.
Sparkle 3 stripped away some of that feeling in favor of a linear story.
Sparkle Zero strips any feeling of immersion and just gives you a carbon copy of flOw.

If they wanted to make more money, they should've just called it flOw (PC Version) since that's all it is.
I wouldn't be surprised if Sony threatened to sue Forever Entertainment, that's how close the similarities are.
Remember, there is no *PC version of flOw, all ports are for PlayStation platforms only.

*Unless you count the original Flash game made in 2006.

'Sparkle ZERO' is a casual game. A controller is recommended to play this game but not absolutely necessary. You control a sea-dwelling creature called a sparkle. The only thing you need to do is swim around and eat everything you can. The more you eat, the larger your sparkle becomes. When you reach the maximum size (level 50), the game ends.

Your sparkle will look different depending on the type of food you eat the most. Unlike the other Sparkle games, there is no color to differentiate the types of food, and no tutorial or explanation of the mechanics, so I'm not sure how you're supposed to know what to eat to become the type of creature you prefer. I ended up just devouring everything and suppose I became an average sparkle, the 'omnivore' of 'Sparkle 2 Evo'.

'Sparkle ZERO' is not a colorful game like the other Sparkle games. Look at the screenshots. It's practically a game in black & white. The music is rather weird: it came and went as if someone was slowly turning the volume of my speakers all the way down and then back up to where it was, and repeated this the whole time.

Steam tells me I played the game for 87 minutes. In that time, I finished the game and got all the achievements. So it's a very short experience. It didn't need to be any longer, because the last 10 minutes or so I was getting bored with it already and just kept playing until the game ended, to get that last achievement to pop.

I noticed two technical issues, as well:
- when using a controller: after you opened any of the menu options and go back to the main menu, you can't navigate anymore (pressing 'up' or 'down' on the controller does nothing), so you have to use the mouse to navigate the menu;
- when the game ends, the screen becomes white and freezes like that. You need to force a shutdown of the game by using the task bar (or maybe alt + F4 works too, I didn't try).

I don't think I'll be recommending this game. I bought it for only 99 cents and enjoyed it for what is was, but it's way too short for its full price and 'Sparkle 2 Evo' is a better alternative because it's more colorful and more varied. If you like this sort of game and can buy it heavily discounted, it'll bring you about an hour and a half of fun and an easy 100% achievements, but that's it. I see no reason to play this game twice.

Comparing to Sparkle 3 Genesis (and even Sparkle 2 Evo) this game is a step back.

Despite of all drawbacks, Sparkle 3 was interesting to play. It had goals and progress.

This game feels rather pointles and boring with minimized variety of what to do in game.

Graphic looks like random fractals. I mean, not like specially modeled but like randomly generated orderless staff.

There is same blue design for all following levels (devs said so on forum). Without even bits of scenery levels feel empty and one-dimensional.

I don't like blur and chromatic aberration effects (they are nauseating and cause motion sickness) and there is no way to turn it off completely. Not to mention they are just a cheap way to hide lack of details which used way too frequently in many recent games.
(Not sure what "Tilt blur" change, all cubes, creature tail and other objects still blurred, even if you uncheck it from options menu)

White screen flashes (when you switch between menu entries) not a good solution when you play the game with mostly dark screens.

After 10 minutes of gameplay I had half of achievements (it may hint you on how small this game really is).

Note: time played is 15 minutes, three levels (I couldn't play it more because of above mentioned effects), the rest is idling for cards.

TL;DR Cons outweigh the Pros, while the game is fun for a minute or two it's ultimately bland and not worth the money. Sorry devs.

Time to give this a real review, now that I've beaten the game. I'll start with the pros;

- Simple gameplay
- Nice atmosphere/ beautiful graphics
- Eat ****, get bigger; really fun to watch

Now the cons....so many cons.....

- No tutorial, not even a simple menu to show basic commands. Took me 5 minutes trying to get through my first portal before I gave up and googled it. For those wondering, it's the "R" key or scroll the mouse wheel down.

- Bumpers. F***ing BUMPERS. They exist just to ruin your day. They make you want to strangle whatever idiot thought it would be a good idea to make these. I don't mind a challenge, but those F******* BUMPERS. I would suggest the devs balance these so they're not as aggresive, just my opinion.

- Eating speed. Everytime you eat a little cube your sparkle's mouth closes for a second and he can't eat, then it opens and... you get it (except when eating enemy remains, those are how it should be). Now this alone wouldn't be annoying, but the devs made these little lines of cubes everywhere for you to follow that lead to cube fields or enemies. Problem is, your 'sparkle' moves juuuuust fast enough and eats juuuuuust slow enough that you have to hesitate at every cube i.e you can't just swim through the line to your objective and gobble the cubes as you go. It gets old....fast.

- It's bland. While the atmosphere is nice there's really nothing to do but eat cubes and attack the 2 types of enemies. Bland.

- Enemies die too easily, everything is a 2 hit kill. Jellyfish (?), 2 hits. Giant sparkle as big as you, 2 hits. It would be better if the other sparkles got more health the bigger they got, more of a real challenge.

- No replayability. Once you've seen the first level, that IS the whole game. Once you've beaten it you have no reason to play it again.

- It's short. Completed it in roughly 1 hour, I think. (play time is higher because I let it idle for a while)

Good (kinda) mindless fun in small doses.
Eat food, grow bigger, & repeat. Eat other fishes/ sparkles (??) & turn them into food too.
Took me just under 2hrs to collect all 11 achievements & get the 3 trading cards.
Only cost 49c during a 90% Off sale, so i'd consider it pretty good value for that amount of change. $4.99 which is full price, i'm not too sure about. I'd recomend waiting for the sale personally.

Maybe the other games in this series are good, but this one isn't.

You are an organism floating through some sort of tech sea. The game, if it can be called that, is similar to pac man if pac man had no walls, no enemy ghosts, no fruit powerups.... really just a mouth and dots.

Pros:
- Pleasant sound and music
- The art is interesting for what it is
- Control is easy to figure out and works as you would expect
- Achievements and cards I guess

Cons:
- short
- easy
- boring
- there is no way to die or fail. You just swim around collecting spark blobs. The end, when you finally get there, is terrible, and appears to be bugged.
- on your quest to level 50 there is nothing that shows you your current experience or what level you are on. Yeah, so my stupid swim thing got big enough to fill half the screen.... so I'm almost done with this right?

This competes with fishtank simulators, except this one pretends it is a game. I was not impressed.

3/10

Interesting game

You basically evolve your little creature to a bigger one by eating these shiny things floating around. I imagine this is the micro level of life and your like a little celled amoeba or something.

Anyways, the game is kinda fun, and very easy to get all achievements for it without much difficulty. There is a ending bug that seems to mess up the game after you beat it, but that is only bug i found. Recommended you play this game with a controller. Anyways, the game is relaxing and interesting. Only problem is you can get bored of just "eating" the sparkles all the time. It is actually very easy to beat this game, look at my time to see just how fast i got all the achievo's and beat it..

This also includes two other games in the series:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/253650

http://store.steampowered.com/app/361190



Recommended for interesting idea and "eat and grow/evolve" type game

tldr
1.) Thumbs UP because it doesn't suck outright and I like the Sparkle franchise.
2.) Don't buy this game for full price.
3.) Easy and fast 100% achis.

Very simple, very short. If you like driving around and eating everything you come across as a single player game, this game might be for you. Controls literally (and entirely) consist of "hold left mouse button and steer" with occasional attempts to find a way through annoying indesctuctible items. I can't imagine why they made it controller compatible, but hey, it'll appeal to some hairless apes.

I have to give a solid :thumb: to this game if you can get it in a bundle, but you'll spend more time idling out the cards than you will getting all the achievements and "winning" the game by becoming the biggest sparkle ("...or ARE you...?" - which is literally the endgame text before a persistent whitescreen fades in. Forever. Further, the ESC menu is also pure white, and now can't be navigated, so you have to ALT+TAB out to kill the app.

Yep, that's three intentional spoilers... but you read them anyway, and now know how it all ends, you poor sap.

With that as the "Ultimate" commentary, this game just ain't worth the price tag of $5, and bears *nothing* even remotely similar to the satisfying organism development guidance that Sparkle2 held.

Pros
- fast 100% achievements
- inoffensive and relaxing "stoned" ambiance
- minor puzzle solving (i.e. "hit things twice so you can eat the parts they break into," and "some things can't be eaten")

Cons
- fast 100% achievements means extra time spent idling cards, if you care about that
- inoffensive "stoned" ambiance isn't something interesting past the first 5 minutes. Also, it's not metal... boooo!
- minor puzzle solving (i.e. "your neighbor's annoying illiterate kid with Down's Syndrome can probably figure it out with one finger up his nose")

pure 5/10 - effort was put in, but nothing special was achieved... you get the trophy for showing up MMEU.

Sparkle Zero is a step backward in this genre, there are no missions at all, no tutorial or evolution statistic (unlike its predecessors), Worse graphic and awful sounds, no cool music like sparkle 2 and 3
It's not worth 4 bucks, take Sparkle 2 instead

Well it's an ok game. Sparkle 2 Evo is much better, even 3 is. This one's short and easy, more of a grinder without any possibility of taking action in evolution of your sparkle.

I got it for 0.99 €, wouldn't recommend to pay more.

Big fan of the whole Sparkle series, scooped this one up with a coupon. Takes about an hour to beat the whole game if you've played Sparkle before--I ended up leaving the game running another hour to harvest the bonus trading cards. It's minimalist on the details and gameplay, but very relaxing for the eyes and ears. This installment does not have the option to customize the evolution of your sparkle's DNA like in Evo and Genisis. 6.5/10

Anyone being used to Sparkle knows that you need to eat nutriments so that your little sparkle can grow into a powerful organism that can be herbivore, carnivore or omnivore. So, you were used to the green, blue or red elements floating, with medusaes to eat or any other species wanting to challenge you. Besides, some levels were huge as you needed to use vortex to reach another level.

That's Sparkle 2 Evo and Sparkle 3 Genesis.

Erase everything you've learned because Sparkle ZERO, despite belonging to the same series, just wants you to grow a sparkle, without any tutorial and learning about the commands, that will be the predator of everyone. No more carnivore, herbivore or omnivore, no more faster sparkle or with a better range of absorption or with a better defense. However, everything else is still there: micro-elements that will grow your sparkle, jellyfishes still floating, other species still there to annoy you (bumpers that will send you far away of your food, parasites stealing it, etc.) and vortex to use if you want to evolve.

You don't have missions anymore, you're just eating, growing in a deep blue sea, with white stuff all around. You still have that sixth sense that will guide you to the nutriments but now, your little one can also sense vortex or enemies and show the way to them, which is good because as usual, the minimap on your right corner isn't really clear. I've seen it because I recognize the symbol for a vortex. Now, on the map, you can also see species wandering around.

I don't know how many layers exist because I finished the game before checking if I was at the end or not. I largerly preferred the ancient system of levels and missions, mainly because you can come back to them and keep growing in beautiful landscapes.

I finished the game in 95 minutes, where the others took me more time to do it. I was kinda disappointed that I couldn't control anymore the evolution of my little sparkle thanks to the DNA manipulation and that I couldn't see my level, so that I didn't know if I was nearing level 50 or not. I managed to reach it quickly because I've cleaned every floor - in other words, I've eaten all elements presents and defeated every enemy.

Sparkle ZERO has still a relaxing soundtrack, at least, the new developers didn't remove that good feature.

I was under the impression that Sparkle ZERO was in reality the first game in the series, if I didn't check before if it was the case. Apparenlty, it's not. For me, it's a huge step behind compared to Genesis and Evo and for the new player, without any indication about the commands, it will seem impossible to use a vortex. I only managed to do it because I remembered more or less how it was for the other games.

So, should I recommend it or not? I must say that the game is avoiding a thumb down because I still enjoyed the challenge, despite all the missing features that I liked. But if you want to try one of the Sparkle game, I would point you to Evo and Genesis.