aMAZE Dark Times

⠀

7/10

EASY PEASY!

aMAZE Dark time presents a challenging puzzle experience within the aMAZE series, increasing in difficulty as you progress.

aMAZE Dark time presents a challenging puzzle experience within the aMAZE series, increasing in difficulty as you progress. Maneuver a gear to unlock a portal with a key and reach the finish line. This installment offers a timer feature that can be disabled in the level selection menu. The game features darker color schemes, often set against wooden backgrounds. The main goal is to obtain the key and reach the exit within a specified time limit.

aMAZE Dark Times is a typical puzzle maze game.

The controls are terrible and the ball acts super oddly. The description of the game states that you can use W A S D or arrows to move the ball, but I initially thought you couldn't.... until I clicked on the instructions of how to control the ball to switch them, why are just both of them not enabled by default??? The graphics are very unappealing and super distracting, some parts are so dark you can't even see the paths and the key is hard to find at times. The music is repetitive and extremely annoying to listen to, probably one of the worse song I've ever in a video game. The game plays just like a flash game, so as a paid product it falls short.

The game is around an hour long. This game has a special feature which is a timed mode, which is totally optional. Honestly, who wants to play a game with that many dead ends with a timer? So pretty much, I just decided to turn off the feature and it ends up being just another copy of the aMAZE games. It's not less or more fun than the other iterations of this game, but the controls feels even worse and it's harder to see where you're going in this game over the other ones.

Overall, it feels boring. Passable if you like maze games.

This is a simple game where you solve mazes. That's just about it. There's a timed mode if you want a challenge, but you can easily turn it off for a more relaxing experience. It's calming and fun, and I recommend it if you just want to sit and get into a zone. My one complaint is that for a couple of the mazes, the way the background is designed, it hides the path to the end of the maze by looking like a wall that you can't pass through. Other than that, a relaxing game that is a bit hypnotic. Worth the price, for sure.

You can move omni-directionally in this aMAZE game. Just don't forget to turn off the timer when you start, otherwise you will find you barely have time to collect the key and reach the exit, even in the early levels.

Pretty fun if you like mazes and their other games. Music is pretty catchy as well.

All levels are well designed.Great game for timepass.It can get challenging if played with the Timer on.Nice work by Blender Games

it really gets you pumped up you are always at 1 or 2 seconds,for a game this cheap its really good,for the people who like timed games this is my top 1 recommended.!

Simple puzzle game to relax

funny casual game... but !! again.. main menu and gameplay are the same!!! almost!!!

Date of completion: November 30, 2019.

Review: This was the first aMAZE introducing their "objects to activate the portal" concept, along with adding a timer...which could thankfully be optionally turned off. 😅 Otherwise the gameplay's the same, along with me with a sore wrist when I finished it. 😐

I played this game for 2 hours and earned 100% of the Achievements, all 210 of them before writing this review. I don’t know where this game came out in regards to the other aMAZE franchise installments, but much like aMAZE and aMAZE 2, it doesn’t have a lot going for it. It is a very simple puzzle game, but with a few new gimmicks, but nothing that makes it truly stand out. A huge drawback for this game in particular is the dark background art, sometimes it will be dark in places that sort of look like they may be walls for the maze, and that will really mess you up. There isn’t enough in the game for a long review, so, best I can say is, it is a cheap and easy game to boost your achievement and perfect game number. I had fun with it, but it goes fast.

People who I would recommend it to
1) People looking to boost their perfect game number
2) Fans of old pen and paper mazes

People who should not play this
1) Everyone.

aMAZE Dark time is a puzzle game and a game of the aMAZE series that progressively gets harder. You control a gear and you have to direct it to a key to open a portal and reach the finish line which is that portal, it's more complex than aMAZE. It's a fun game and is a kid friendly game. It's like those mouse cheese maze type games. Here only game play matters. The one flaw is that sometimes the gear gets stuck on weird corners. (mainly on later rounds) Overall it's a decent old concept game.

tl:dr - Overall it was worth 2 hrs of time and while I found a lot to complain about, I did enjoy the mazes for the most part.

+ Mazes! I like mazes.
+ The orange/black colors for the backgrounds were nice.
+ It's hard to argue with the price.

- The timer is ridiculous and not possible without excessive repetition. Even then, the controls make it incredibly frustrating. (You can turn it off.)
- It throws achievements at you for doing nothing.
- The backgrounds are occasionally low res and too dark in spots.
- The mazes are too predictable.
- The music is only a few seconds of repeatable notes that quickly gets old and annoying. (You can turn it off).

I have a thing against achievement games. I think they're stupid. I would never have picked this up except that a friend liked it and said it was worth playing. Then I checked the forum and someone said the timer was impossible. I like challenges, so....

The timer is virtually impossible. I have no idea why they even bothered to put it in in the first place, but you can turn it off. The mazes are still pretty good. It's definitely a low quality game. You can see that from the screenshots. Some of the backgrounds are too dark. The ball isn't as responsive (or overly responsive?) as it should be. The last maze is huge but was disappointingly easy. There's plenty to not like, yet if you like mazes, you'll get your $1's worth. Yes, it throws achievements at you. Each maze gives you 2-3 then you get a bunch at the end.

It's disappointingly lacking in strategy. For the most part, the mazes are quite predictable and extremely easy. You pick up a key, then go to the center. The key is on one side and you'll invariably have to reverse most of way back to the top where you start and find the only remaining route to the center.

I enjoyed it enough that for it's price I can't really give it a negative review despite the drawbacks. I might even get another one...

This is still a, mostly, enjoyable title in the aMaze series.
A timer has been added, which you can toggle off on the level selection pane.
The colouration is much darker --often with wood backgrounds.
Objective: get key, get to the exit within X time.

Issues:
Controls remain unresponsive.
There is a rolling/speed up dynamic in place where you can accellerate when you roll against a wall. (this is problematic as you can "snag" on walls and simply stop moving at all)
The timer, on several levels, is very short. If you happen to "snag"(see above) then you will loose the level and need to restart.

Decent achievement farm and, with the timer off, a fairly relaxed mazing game. The timer, whilst an excellent addition--I'm sure many aMaze fans were already timing themselves on their first run through, has too short a time span when accounting for the unresponsive controls and roller mechanic--making several levels--especially the hexagon/honeycomb levels tedious with "wall snags".

Overall worth a buy if on sale or as part of a discounted bundle.

The aMAZE games have never been Earth-shattering experiences, they're always just casual, laid back games you play to switch off and relax. While most certainly being flawed, they've never been poorly executed enough to offend your gaming sensibilities, either, and have largely just hovered high enough above the "average" water mark to be enjoyable. But this is where they've sunk bad.

The simple maze formula has mostly been incrementally tweaked along the way, staying true to navigating a ball through a top-down maze over sixty stages - nothing too fancy, but still fun. This time they've added keys to mix, taken the theme and imagery into a pretty horrid direction, and added a timer to the mix. Points for trying something new!... Minus twice as many points for being terrible experiences.

For a start, requiring a key before you unlock the centre of each maze just kind of feels like busy work. More often than not, all that means is instead of maybe seventy to eighty percent of the maze being unused, now most of it is, but the maze will usually just be 50/50 split where one side will lead inevitably to the key, before you backtrack and repeat the process on the other side to the exit. So rather than having more room to provide fake paths that are really dead ends, you'll more likely to always be heading in the right direction toward something.

I hate to use this word, since it just seems like such a blunt, bludgeoning term, but I'm going to say it... this game is ugly. Aggressively ugly. There's an attempt to make every stage look like it's set over the image of an ancient, medieval scroll or parchment, with dreary, cracked canvasses in beige or brown. Far too often the edges of the screen will also be pitch black, obscuring the outer edges of the maze as well, making it seem as though some paths are actually impassable.

Despite these issues, as I said, given the layout due to the addition of keys, this still managed to be the easiest of these games to date, yet also the most boring. Increasing the level count to one hundred hasn't helped, either, only giving you more busy work and aiding in highlight all its failings. As such, having played them all in the order of their release, this has to be the weakest so far.

Fun good game and the levels hard to do you can turn the time off and make sure you get the key on each levels before you go on to the next level of the game

Ok, we all know the Amaze series.
We all know we all reviewed this series quite positively - it features lots of mazes, which get larger and different in shape, and you may spend hours to complete every single game 'cos the biggest levels are quite challenging.
Nothing spectacular or impossible, of course.. you just have to reach the center of the maze or the exit. It can actually become quite boring.
But this instalment is timed, and has two parts: you have to collect a key, and then reach the center of the maze.
Of course it's a tweak, so that the games aren't exactly the same, but actually the key thing adds nothing. I mean, it's no more go from A to B, it's go from A to B and then to C. And this makes every level at least twice as lengthy, which REALLY becomes annoying.. not to say that the key is a simple "tile" of the same color of the borders (and often similar to the background) so it can be frustrating when it's super small to even locate it.
And then on to the "time attack mode": it's really too challenging. I mean, it's "easy" if you first get the path to the key, die, repeat the path, die while you seek a way to get to the C point, but the timer is so fucking low that you still die and then on your fifth try you manage to rush to the exit.
And this makes the whole game unplayable and unenjoyable.
And then comes the surprise: you somehow learn that you can turn the timer off. I mean, you start timed, keep on playing timed, and then you go back to the menu and see that you can actually turn it off.
'Cos of course the developers saw that no one was capable to play this forcibly timed, and then turned it off.
So, why a negative review then?
'Cos this is actually Amaze 4 - it's the fourth game, the other three were already out for months. And you're making a time attack mode which is unplayable - it would be challenging, but the timing is so ridiculous that it makes you die ten times per level. So you turn it off.
Then you have the key. And so you have to spend twice or thrice the time on the same level.
And then you have the mazes. But they're the same of the first three games.
And as always with Amaze you can't remap the keys - only directional keys, no WASD or other options.
So, this game completely failed in its two new features, the key thing and the time thing, and that's all. Better play the first ones, you're not missing anything really here.

Good maze game, worth the price you pay, i like how this time around they've made it so you have to find your way to the key and then to the exit, makes for a much more challanging game

Edit: Today, the dev added an option to turn off the timer.
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Adding a time limit to a labyrinth game was the worst decision the dev could make. The time limit is so hard, you cannot even spend half a second at the beginning of the level to look, where the key and the goal is. You have to look, then restart the level. And even then you have to master each labyrinth. Loose a second somewhere on your path and you most likely must restart. Imagine doing this for the endgame labyrinths.

Simply way too frustrating!