Algotica Iterations

The core gameplay is ok but the interface is horrible. It feels like a proof of concept, not a finished product.

At least the devs removed the broken achievement.

I can see why there is a lot of criticism for this game. Plenty of problems and bugs, The UI is really annoying and in many cases things just don't make too much sense. It might be a nice game if you have nothing better to do, but for the price its not really worth it in my opinion.
Sadly due to the poor UI and the game being kinda buggy the puzzles were not really that fun. Like the fact that, while a core part of the game being about optimising code, the player can easily circumvent using a line of code by use of a function which counts as one no matter how many times it is used.

Overall it is clear that this game has not really been tested much nor has it been updated since release.

4/10
The art design quite cute and puzzles are interesting, but UI and UX ruins everything.
I don't remember other puzzle game that i droped after few minutes.

This is such a weird game for me.
Could not even find the exit button for quite some time. Got to be honest, I can't recommend it. You just stayed to get complete the Steam Achievements, otherwise I would have deleted it after 20 minutes.

The basic control structures of programming relate to sequence, selection (aka decision making) and iteration. Algotica does a somewhat reasonable job at exploring only two of these constructs (namely sequence and iteration). While the game offers a fun platform to apply them, it would have provided so much more scope if at least *some* decisions were allowed. This wouldn't necessarily require a bunch of complex logic... even just a simple IF *obstruction* THEN *turn/reverse/jump* might suffice. Such a feature would have added more dynamism in the later levels¹. It could have also helped to make the game a little bit more 'lively' (no offence to the killer snails).

That being said, Algotica provides a cute environment with some clever variations on its construct mechanics (e.g. portals, cubes, valves… and snails). Overall, it's an enjoyable -- albeit short -- indie game that is largely worth its price tag.

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¹ or maybe even an evolution for Stage 3!

Very nice little game! Knowing nothing about programming, I actually learned a lot and had a good time. I didn't experience any bugs or glitches and everything saved properly. Extra levels with extra notes were great (6_0 is brutal until you cheat it). Needless to say, I don't agree with the negative reviews and wouldn't pay much attention to them. Highly recommended!

It was okay. I played it for an hour and finished all the stages for the 0 and first level. I tried to exit and accidentally erased my file (the "Do you really want to" button <-- even though there's another yes/no prompt I was so eager to leave I didn't think about it!). Despite that... it may have been a blessing in disguise because I realized I had no interest in playing the game again and progressing. It felt slow to me (I felt like some of the stages were repetitive). The mechanics felt buggy - sometimes it wouldn't register my selection or I'd get an empty space in my list of commands. It is a pretty game and it is challenging... so if you really like puzzles, this might be something to try. I'm too inpatient though!

If this game were ever to be updated, it would be nice if you could hover over a level and see a preview of what stage it was and your best route (I don't think this pops up unless you finish the stage). Another good update would be the ability to see your best route. After finishing a level (which consists of many stages), I often had to revisit to make my routes more efficient... however I didn't know which ones I needed to work on!

Well, it works... Somehow. It is actually a little puzzle game where you need to crack the proper algorithm to run your robot through the field. Just as the store page promises.

The problem is - it feels too tiny. Hollow as well. Sure, there are nice visuals (until you reach levels when you can't see half of the field thanks to the developer will). There is even some story that you can, theoretically, save your princess at the end of the journey, but... there is no journey, actually. It is but a short line of levels that you can go through in about one hour or so. Maybe 2 or 3 hours, if you want to find the best solutions for every level and farm all Steam cards. But I can't really like that project or recommend it to anyone.

Considering the promised "educational" part of the game, well... I've tried that game on my preliminary school kids, and it was too easy even for their level. And I'm not bragging about how smart my kids are, no. They're just normal. It's " the "Algotica Iterations" that is too dull even for kids. So, as for mark, I'd say, 4/10, considering the hollow and unfinished nature of that project. Buy it only with a 90% discount, and only if you want some fast "complete" game behind your belt. Other than that... it's not worth the trouble.

This shouldn't be sold in its current state.

The game isn't terrible by any means, you can see the workings of a great game, however it feels very clunky and a bit unfinished. The art is beautiful and it feels like the most work was put into that, but the rest of the game is... functional, mostly.... Firstly the game isn't translated very well, this is immediately obvious upon first starting it up, the game tries to get across a 'story' but the English is... 'broken' at best. Surely it's not that tricky to get somebody to correct a few lines of English for you?

Next is the fairly mediocre UI, although the game itself is quite simple, it doesn't do a great job of explaining what you're meant to click on and what button does what. The icons are a bit odd and the game even has to remind you to 'Click on the robot and then click on the yellow button' because it's not immediately obvious where the 'Go' button is. Since this is the most core aspect of the game I feel this is the kind of thing that needs to be instantly understandable by a player, but Algotica doesn't do this well. Other various UI elements don't look great and don't really work very well either, you can open windows and parts of the UI but it's not obvious how to close them, some UI elements feel way too large etc...

The game is also a bit... eh. It doesn't feel that much fun, the feedback isn't great and the levels can get a bit tedious and repetitive. Couple that with the tricky to use UI and it gets tiresome quickly. It was fun for about 15 minutes before I got tired of it honestly.

Nice idea, but horribly executed.

The HUD is bad and clearly made for smartphones. There's no button to close menus, they close automatically after a few seconds. So while you're looking at the level, "writing" your "code", the menu suddenly closes and you have to reopen it again. The code sometimes seems to rearrange itself so you'll have to delete it - there's a button for resetting it entirely, but if you want to delete single lines, you have to drag & drop each one into a bin - because you simply lose the entire overview.

The translation isn't the best. The "Start a new game button" is called "Do you really want to" and when you click it, a message pops up "Do you really want to start a new game?"
Same issue in the German version. Everytime I start the game or go back to the menu, it reverts all my changes, i.e. the language is German again and the 2 options "Smartphone Mode" and "Mute Music" are checked. The latter one isn't an issue because the values are reverted - checked means unchecked. If you want to mute the music, deactivate the option "mute music".

Now those aren't huge issues that would keep me from playing, even though the self-closing menus are annoying. The riddles are nice, the music and sound effects are beatiful, I absolutely love the graphics. But there's one thing that made me uninstall the game after 30 minutes.

In each level you have limited memory, i.e. if you have a memory of 5, you can "write" 5 lines of code such as "Forward", "Turn left" etc. You often don't need all of them, so you can save memory in each level which will add up to your total score.

The problem is, this score isn't optional. Even though this game gives you additional memory for each puzzle you aren't allowed to use it.

World 1 has 5 levels and you need to save 5 memory in order to unlock world 2. World 2 has 10 levels and you need to save 25 memory in total to unlock world 3. When I finished world 2, I only saved 23 memory in total. Now what do I have to do? Replay old levels and beat my highscores, of course. The problem is: I don't know, which levels I have to repeat. The game doesn't give me any feedback on whether I found the optimal solution or not. Even worse: The game doesn't even tell me my score in each level. This means that I'd have to replay 15 levels, again and again, trying to find faster solutions, hoping that the best I find is the optimal one.

I spent less than 30 minutes to play through 15 levels almost perfectly and now the game wants me to spend at least an hour more with trial & error, replaying everything I played before, just so I can progress further. And that's simply not worth my time.

Just add some simple feedback to the level selection screen and this whole issue is fixed.

I clearly don't recommend the game, as in its current state the progression system is too flawed. It's a shame because the visuals and the atmosphere are simply beautiful.

Btw, there's an achievement "Find the jump command" you can't unlock because you have this command from the beginning. According to the Steam forums, the latest remaster update broke it.

Disgusting.

The implementation is very bad. Achievements do not work. The developer spit on the game.
The levels are easy and pass quickly. The game is kind and beautiful, but done worse than on the Flash-games. Graphics settings absolutely do not affect anything. FPS is disgusting anyway.

If you want to learn "programming" it's better to choose another game.

The art is beautiful, but otherwise this game is very obviously unfinished: the "plot" is just a few very poorly-proofread blurbs, with no conclusion, extremely buggy and fussy UI (literally mspaint rectangles, often unresponsive, unintuitive, elements stretch off-screen, etc.), and it's trivial to trigger buggy behavior randomly (e.g. restarting when a snail is mid-move can make it continue the move after the reset when the game is supposed to be paused).
The developer clearly just got tired of working on it and released the work in progress, which is ultimately like 60% of an actually releasable game. It was dishonest of him to not list this as Early Access at the very least.

There are much better programming games out there. One's that don't leave you guessing as to the basic rules of the damn thing. It doesn't even bother to tell you how the jump command works (tip: it takes an int as an argument) and even when you know how it works it leaves you to guess by trial-and-error just what argument to use.

Without a better tutorial that explains the basic rules, this is just not worth the effort.

The controls are way too tedious, and weirdly unresponsive for this type of game. I spent more time inputting commands than I did coming up with solutions. Not worth it even at the discounted price. Go play something from Zachtronics instead.

I would really like to recommend this game. But as you can see from all the other reviews, this game has/had a ton of bugs. The bugs actually prevented you from beating levels and subsequently the game, but I managed to persevere to that last level because I genuinely enjoyed playing it until I found out that it was actually unbeatable in its previous state. However, I had faith that there would be updates to fixit and that I would eventually be able to finish the game.

Supposedly, the "Remasterd" versions fixes a lot of things, but you'll have the play the whole game again because your old save will not work. All the progress I originally had is now gone. And frankly, considering how broken it was before, would not trust that it's actually fixed this time, and I am not going to risk playing it to find out it's still broken and unbeatable. Save your money.

I got this game at a discounted price of like 3 bucks. It still wasn't worth it. The game has some potential if you like programming games, but it is far from ready for release at this time. This should be in early access.... Very early access. So far this is literally the only game I have had to request a refund for.

There are essentially no instructions/explanations in the game. There are two 'programming modes' one disparagingly called kids mode, which it is apparently not possible to complete the game with. And another that requires you to type out commands (which I'm ok with since I type quickly) however. Even with this I had to look up a walkthrough just to get through one of the tutorial missions because the game does not tell you vital information about how it works.

Played (well... more accurately TRIED to play) for 45 minutes. Never got past the tutorial - only suggested help was to "optomize" the code.

The new story shows signs that google translate was used to get the english version. Lots of poor grammar and strange phrasings...

I tried to play a few times. First time I ran the game, it did not register when I completed a level (the robot walks over the target and falls off - fails the level).

After restarting, the next try it did register. This after spending time to discover that the numeric keypad "Enter" key does not run the program - you must use the keyboard one (just beside your shift key).

Eventually got to the last level of the tutorial(?) levels and completed it. But the rest of the game is locked because the code apparantly isn't optomized enough. Unfortunately, there are more cows on the moon than there are characters of instructions for this game.

Given the intended target is people looking for simple programming and logic solving, most of that market will not get past the first level, never mind the tutorial. (It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to even get my program to run...).

Keeping in mind that this is a programming game, you must type in all commands. But if you make a typo - don't use the delete key! It will erase the instruction and you need to start over. To add commands you need to click on a plus button to put up a text box, type in the command, then click for the next box, repeating until complete. Very awkward programming this way since you can't use just the mouse nor just the keyboard.

There is an option to use "touch" mode so that you can just click on isntructions to add them, but this even has 2 drawbacks - you can't edit commands (some take a parameter - but not if you use touch mode), and for some insane reason you have to keep clicking on the button to bring up the list of commands every second command (or even every command). It auto closes about 2 seconds after your last click on it.

All in all, the present form (and yes, this is the remastered version I'm talking about) is still way too far in early access mode to be considered a real release, despite being released (originally) a year ago...

I'll check back on it in a week to see if anything has been improved, otherwise I will refund it.

Edit: After dev feedback, it seems that this logic game is intended that you try random things to determine how the processing logic even works. No documentation of syntax, no explanation of program flow - these things are considered "lazy tutorial" concepts.

Sorry, just not my thing - Take a look at any Zachtronics games and see what real documentation looks like. No lazy tutorial in them, but full explanation of how the code is processed, and syntax of every command. How you actually solve the problems is up to you. But at least guessing how the system works is not one of the problems.

Refunded as Algotica is not what I am looking for in a logic puzzle game.

I want to start this review by saying the idea of remastering a game already released and bought feels wrong to me.
I bought the game under a pretense of what that game was. The ramaster hasn't changed too much from what the game was before, but it completely deleted the old save and changed the story completely. That this was a remaster that deletes the old game completely and not just a new game released under a new title surprises me.

However, it's a good surprise. The old Algotica was shit. If i cared enough, i would have written a negative review about the lovely visuals and problematic everything else.

I'm not sure if the new story is a direct upgrade. Instead of you piloting your robot because of this silly robot rebellion inside th computer, we're a human transfering our conscience into a virtual world looking for an (ex?) girlfriend. The new story isn't as cutesy and charming as the old one, but it packs a bit more punch.

In terms of gameplay there's a lot of improvement. This game is all about writing code to direct your little robot from the start of a level to the end. Before the remaster, I had no idea why you had an option to make you write out all the code in writing boxes before instead of just pressing the buttons to make the code for you. Using the button commands is a lot faster and easier (although it does make the coding feel less authentic). The 2x speed is a really nice addition for this sort of puzzle leveL, but the best part is that rediculous buggy overworld is gone. While selecting levels from a menu is more boring, i'm not confused about what levels i should do to unlock what commands and the game isn't crashing.

There are still a bunch of issues i have with the game. I noticed forward(x) increments when you hit enter to run the code, which means your code is changing as you run it (very silly). If you add commands too quickly the command list will bug out and occationally delete code. The way to start running the code is unclear. On the first level it took me 2 minutes before realizing i had to hit a physical keyboard button to start the level. I would love it if some text popped up in the tutorial saying "Press enter to run the program." Having to click on the robot for the options menu feels akward and unintuitive. The level design feels a bit too linear. I understand that optimizing your code is a big part of the game, but i feel very limited in my options and the decision making process isn't very interesting. Needs a bigger variety of interactions, or have the existing interactions have more applications than what is explicitely asked by the level. Just something to up the complexity and make the puzzles a bit more interesting.

Overall, it's an improved puzzle game with a fun coding theme and nice visuals. Really pleased.

I got my first refund for this one.

It looked very nice, and it's an impressive piece of work from a single developer. I reeeally wanted too like this, but couldn't bring myself to continue, because it was too easy, and therefore boring. Maybe it gets more difficult later on, but you can't even really rush through the easier levels, because you're limited by the robot's slow movements, the narrative and the repetitive typing. You're basically just typing a recipe for the robot to follow, instead of playing with algorithms.

This game could learn a lot from the flash game Lightbot. Have the commands as icons to click (maybe have the gameplay settings option to write the whole thing as code, but in a proper sort of editor instead of having to switch between keyboard and mouse constantly), and add a fast forward button so we're not forced to wait for the bot to slooowly turn around, and slooowly take each individual step. Heck, the entire tutorial should be skippable.

The basic concept of this game is not unique: At the very least I have played one other game with the same basic mechanics... at first.

Where this game stands out is that it actually has depth: It keeps going and becoming more challenging, while constantly adding more mechanics.

You may not learn enough about programming to immediately get a job as a programmer after playing this, but if you legitimately beat this game, you can only have experienced thought of the sort of ways a programmer must think. While most programmers these days almost never have to deal with the layered memory constraints this game presents, we often deal with constraints that cause our minds to work in similar ways to how they must here.

I applaud this game and would suggest it to anyone interested in a difficult puzzle, though I do worry about how non-programmers may find some of the problems this game presents: Some are truly tricky. And yet, the things I obtain later on may be the solutions to them; I really can't know yet.

This game is worth your money.

This game is a brilliant of Indie industry - made by one person the game looks too awesome but feels so individual. Developer will speak with you through his project. Because of that it feels like Algotica is alive and you are a part of it, not just a gamer.
Visuals are just great, low-poly graphics made with perfect taste. I hated 3D graphic before I saw this game - now I know that low-poly is my style lol
Mechanics are interesting, during the game I wanted so hard to control the character using just WSDA or Arrows but developer made an adventure from the simple thing - controlling the character. This idea is great, it really feels like I'm the part of a program. I really need to understand this world to go through it.
So, big thanks to the developer who perfectly crushed the wall between himself and gamer!