Quick Critiques: Affordable Space Adventures and Citizens of Earth (Patreon)

We continue our looks at another batch of games in the Nintendo Humble Bundle! Cheap and disappointing!

Affordable Space Adventures

ASA was definitely not what I expected. It looked like a kind of Metroidvania game built around exploring an alien world, but it's really just a rudimentary puzzle game build around fiddling with menus and touch/motion gimmicks. A "puzzle" is that you encounter a trap that detects heat, sound, or electricity so you micromanage your menus until you disable enough systems to get under the threshold of what the trap can detect or else it instantly kills you. At least for the opening stages, that almost always consisted of turning your thrusters way down so your ship plodded along at a snail's pace and generally made the game not fun to play. There wasn't a story beyond "space ships never crash! oops, yours crashed", so there wasn't anything to keep me interested.

Citizens of Earth

CoE picks up later but it has a really bad opening that sets a bad tone. It gives you a ton of quests and no real direction on what's important and what you can do now versus much later in the game, so you're left with an overwhelming quest log and increasing amounts of frustration as you move through each of them only to find you can't do anything with that quest for now. It's desperately going for an Earthbound vibe (to the point of lifting some exact same beats and moments from it and later making a direct reference to Ness), but much like Earthbound, once you look past the "it's wacky" aspect, it's really shallow and kind of boring. It's cute at first with the world and characters, has a fun art style, and a selfish idiot of a protagonist but that's all it has. The battles are tedious and with so many enemies and that they all respawn when you change screens, you're left doing the same thing over and over for few rewards. The characters also don't shut up and you hear the same voice clip multiple times in the same battle. Between the repetition and frequent loading screens, it's a slog to get through. I quit about halfway through the game because I just wasn't having any fun.