Review Information
Game Reviewed Eternity - 4 Level Demo, by Yoshin
Review Author GamerInGeorgia
Created Sep 11 2019, 12:51 AM

General Commentary and Game Overview
Let's start off from the beginning of the hack, shall we? The game's opening cut-scene really had me hooked: Mario is standing in a dark cave, which even has skeletons hanging from the ceiling, and some unknown voice calls out his name. This set up is then followed by a traditional grassland level. What happened to the cave? Who was calling out to Mario? No answers or explanation for what's going on. I feel that there was a lot of wasted potential here to begin weaving some sort of story. That aside, the levels are mediocre (more details in the "Gameplay" section) and the level naming isn't the best, but the art style has a nice charm to it. It's just an all-around decent demo. There's not really anything else to say about a demo this short.
 
Pros - Charming graphical style
- Some custom music
- Some custom enemies
 
Cons - Level design could be better
- Vanilla music clashes with the hack's style
 
Impressions
Gameplay
6 / 10
As this is a ROM hack, I'm going to focus on the level design and the custom objects. The level design could use some work and the levels are pretty short. I'll give two examples of poor level design that I encountered: In the first level of the demo, Tropical Toxins, there's a pointless subarea that could've been made into some kind of bonus room. In Soaked Slope, the demo's second level, for example, you can basically skip the entire level by staying towards the top of the level.
Moving onto custom objects, this mostly amounts to a few custom enemies and a SML2 goal, both of which work really well. I have no problems regarding those. Though I really like what was done with the dialogue boxes; that was a clever way to replace SMW message blocks.
 
Graphics
8 / 10
The Commodore 64 palette gives this game a unique feel. Most of the sprite work is well done, with a few exceptions. On the down side, though, the background is just a solid color, while this may be because of the Commodore 64's palette limitation, I still think it's possible to come up with something better.
 
Sound
7 / 10
While not all levels have custom music yet, the levels/areas that do have tracks that fit their levels/areas well enough. However, even though not all of the music has been replaced yet, the remaining vanilla tracks should at least fit with what's going on. For example, the SMW athletic theme doesn't fit so well when you have Mario standing in a gloomy cavern with skeletons hanging from the ceiling.
 
Final Words
7 / 10
The level design could use some improvement, but, other than that, it's an all-around decent demo.

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