Review Information
Game Reviewed Super Mario Prism, by Hello
Review Author Proking235
Created Jul 9 2019, 10:11 AM

General Commentary and Game Overview
Super Mario Prism is a 3D collect-a-thon made in unity. It stars Mario as he travels through several paintings, collecting Power Stars. The plot is simple enough, the "Sprixie Princess" has been trapped inside a painting and Mario is tasked with getting enough Power Stars to restore the paintings and save the Princess.
 
Pros The game was and still is very bold for a fan game, being made in 3D. Very few other fan games that I am aware of do this, and most that I have played have not done it so well.
I must also say that the game has quite a good camera. Despite being a fan game Super Mario Prism still manages to have one of the best 3D cameras I've ever had the pleasure of using; and for me, a camera is the make or break of any game.
 
Cons Sadly, it falls with the aforementioned 3D fan games as not very good. The gameplay is quite "janky" and nothing quite feels right, The soundtrack is nice at first but becomes extremely grating very quickly, and the graphics are very boring and uninspired.
The story isn't bad, but the way it is communicated somehow manages to be both in and out of the way, and it is very intrusive on the game. There's also the mission design, which is quite poor. The difficulty continuously spikes up and down.
 
Impressions
Gameplay
1 / 10
This is where the game gets bad. The controls are only describable as awful and janky. Let's start with even the most basic controls: moving. The movement works on a momentum based system that is very difficult to judge. One second you're going very slowly, the next you're rocketing off into the stratosphere. Then there is turning. When going straight back and forth, Mario is mostly fine, but sometimes he does his infuriating semi-circle turn from SM64. However, when trying to precisely adjust one's angle, Mario will Sometimes overcompensate, undercompensate, or just turn in a completely different direction to the one held.
All this already and we haven't even talked about jumping. Jumping somehow makes the already broken physics engine somehow worse. When jumping regularly, Mario's turning becomes even worse, now adding not turning at all to the list of movement issues. Then there is wall jumping. Wall jumping is one of the most awkward things in the entire game. Initiating a wall jump is hard enough; Mario must be facing *exactly* 180° from the wall, or else you will be unable to slide on the wall. Then, once you actually kick from the wall, Mario immediately *loses* all of his forward momentum, and all of the turning problems come back into play, but this time Mario will go flying with unparalleled speed in whatever direction he happens to think is a good one. But that's not all of the jumps, sadly, as we also have side flips, backflips, and long jumps. Long jumps make you go ridiculously far at equally ridiculous speeds, but it's not actually that bad a move; in fact, I found myself using it quite frequently to move quickly. It is brought down a great deal, however, as it has the same turning issues as the wall jump, though it will almost never turn in a direction you aren't holding. The side flip is extremely annoying, as it is almost impossible to consistently pull off (thanks in no part to the awful turning controls). Not to mention that the side flip is almost impossible to reangle, and it goes launching in whatever direction it begins in (more often than not leading to unfair deaths or setbacks). Finally, the backflip. The backflip is by far the most stable move in Mario's entire arsenal. The backflip immediately makes Mario do a maximum height jump with no prior speed build-up, and because it is initiated from a crouching state, it almost always negates the terrible turning controls as a crouch forces the player to stop moving.
The last move, which I could fit nowhere else, is the ground pound. It is quite difficult to use, as it is extremely slow and laggy, not to mention that it makes Mario bounce off of almost anything he touches with it.

There are also the hitboxes. The hitboxes are way too strict, forcing you to touch exactly the coin or mushroom, or land exactly on the tiny top of a goombas head. It takes a miracle to hit a brick or question block. There's almost no way to tell where you can or can't stand on a tree. It's one of the most infuriating things with the game, and hitboxes are a major part of any game.
 
Graphics
3 / 10
The graphics are lifeless and uninspired. Despite using 3D worlds assets, nothing actually looks good. The animations are all slow and dead. Nothing actually collides with the ground, and everything moves in an unnerving, robotic way. Then there's the environments. Some use 3D world textures, but most don't. Even those that do look bad, as the environment is made out of squares, with no added polygons to make them actually look alive or vibrant. The other textures I've seen used are a stock .jpg of wood or bricks that don't match the style of the rest of the game at all.
The hud is also poor. There is no way to tell how many of an important item you have, like purple coins or red coins (they don't even appear on the pause screen). The font looks really bad, and the all-white icons with no dithering look very unpleasing to the eye.
Speaking of red coins, numbers do not pop out of red coins to indicate what number you are on, and there is no way to tell how many red coins there are left, which is important as not every red coin mission has eight anymore.
 
Sound
5 / 10
Most of the sound effects themselves are relatively inoffensive. The only problem I have here is the soundtrack. Every song in the game loops extremely quickly, between 30 - 45 seconds or so, and because you hear the songs for large periods of time, they become grating quite fast.
 
Replay
1 / 10
I couldn't even finish the game once it was so bad. The game is infuriating to control, and ultimately that lead me to not even bringing the game to completion once, let alone multiple times.
 
Final Words
1 / 10
The game I downloaded that, advertised as a "Final Product", was what should have been an early alpha build. The game didn't only need more time in the oven, the game was put in the oven before the recipe was even complete. The game needs reworking from almost the ground up. everything about it is either difficult to handle, buggy, or flat out broken.

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