I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to see how games fail before actually releasing a game. In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed. Here is the transcript for Justice For All:
Welcome to The Adventure Mechanics, I'm Chandler. In today's side quest, we'll be taking a look at another game with no reviews and see what went wrong. On the chopping block today, we have Justice for All. It was made in Unity and released in October of 2022 by Charles Wolfe. This appears to be the only game he released under his name. As you know, not having prior finished games or subsequent games in the pipeline isn't a good sign for him as a game developer. From what I can find, this may have been a school project of some sort, and that would be in line with my time playing Justice For All. I think it's optimistic to publish a school project on Steam, but it certainly is not unique, especially in the games with no reviews listings. I enjoy the enthusiasm, but if you're doing a commercial release, you'll need to up your level of polish. But before we answer that question, what is Justice For All? It is a platform shooter, with a basic story line and a variety of weapons and enemies to take out. Once you have taken out enough enemies, the level ends and you are onto the next one. It's really a simple game, all things considered.
So, what's wrong with it? To be blunt, a lot. First of all, the artwork is actually just a series of an asset packs. That's not a bad thing, per se, since it allowed the designer to consider other parts of the game, like level, enemy and weapon design. But like using any tool as a shortcut, you need to give it your personal touch and not just flip assets to make your game. Thankfully, the assets (mostly) work together. There are a few glaring areas it doesn't, though. The pixel art style in cutscenes completely clashes with the flash style of the gameplay. If the designer wanted to use both, they could have put a tv filter or something over the pixel art to try blending it in, or saying the pixel art parts are television broadcasts or something. There are some assets that, when put together, make it harder to identify what is and what is not actually a platform, leading to some situations where you will jump up thinking you're going to land on a platform, only for the platform to not actually exist. This makes the game so much harder to play than it needs to. And all that needed to make this happen was to darken the background tiles while keeping the actual platforms bright. It's not a huge deal breaker in the short time I dedicated to this game, but I can easily see that putting the player down a death pit later in the game. It may be worthwhile to compare the artwork in this game with how old games, like the Nintendo Entertainment System game Rolling Thunder, or it's arcade precursor. I'm not just being an elderly millenial here, the fundamental gameplay between the two are essentially the same and the limitations of an 8-bit system makes level readability the main focus of the artwork.
The paired issue with discerning which parts of the level you can actually use and which are decor is how the player controls. It's awful, frankly. You stop immediately when you attack, eliminating any horizontal momentum you may have had beforehand. And that will kill you. The jumps are floaty, which isn't a bad thing, but it also makes the player feel like they don't weigh anything. That makes it feel like you are trying to move a balloon around the world instead of a freedom fighter. You have limited ammo, but I'll be damned if you know how much ammunition you actually have. And your controls are hardcoded, with no option to change to something more intuitive to you. All of that coupled together, it makes it incredibly difficult to feel like you know what's going on in the game. You will seemingly run out of ammo, grenades and magical(?) things to inflict ranged damage at random and be forced to use a knife. On one hand, it's nice having a melee weapon in case you run out, but on the other, it's infuriating not knowing how much ammunition you have in your possession. All of this could have been mitigated by putting the ammo count on top of the weapons themselves in the UI. Or putting the number above you after shooting, or any other way of bringing that information to the attention of the player. It then forces you to use this toothpick of a knife to try to poke bullet spongy enemies who are in constant motion. So you either run into them and cause yourself to get hurt, or you trail them swinging at the air behind them like an idiot. It's not a great feeling. This could have been improved by allowing the player to move while swinging, but I fear that it would have taken more work to get that to feel right. Again, I'll point to Rolling Thunder as inspiration on how game feel could be much better, with the UI having life, bullets for each weapon, and controls that may be stiff, but they work with the level design and enemies implemented in the game.
And let's talk about the enemies. They are basically red koopas from Mario. They move back and forth, changing direction when they reach the end of their platform. It doesn't matter if they are a lowly melee animal or a heavily equipped boss of the level, they will only ever move back and forth, stopping to attack when they encounter the player. For a platform shooter, this is simply not enough. There need to be more enemy behaviors, even if they aren't smarter than what's here. Ambush enemies, flying enemies, or even a slow chasing enemy would be a welcome change in the behavior. Give me another move besides getting behind an enemy and shooting them in the back. And if enemies are going to be respawning, telegraph it! Doors should open and dump a new enemy onto the platform. Another should parachute from above. Or just move them in from off-screen. Make it more engaging than *poof* another enemy is right where you killed one. That's lazy and bland gameplay. There is one "boss" enemy on each level, which is effectively your ammo sponge that you must spend the majority of your ammunition on. If you waste ammo on minions, you won't have enough to kill the boss. Then, you're stuck with your knife to try killing them, with predictable results. Who are these bosses? Hell if I know. I just know I need to kill them in order to progress. You can just give them a name above their health bar. That would motivate me, at least a little bit, to try killing them. Give your bosses importance. They should be something more than just a larger enemy pacing to and fro, soaking up all the shots and grenades you have with seemingly little effect. This is the main part of the game, and should have been explored much more than what little is in the game right now. All there is in this game is platform shooting. Make it more interesting, please!
The story is similarly bare-bones. There are a few friendlies you can speak to, but you'll end up spending a silly amount of time trying to figure out how to communicate, since the window to talk to them is so very small. They move around, much like the enemies. And you must, must be within that tiny window to start the conversation. Chasing friendlies is not a fun experience. Widen the window to talk to them or stop them from moving. You can't have both. And it's not like they are giving much to the story. The first level has a farmer acting as the worst tutorial I've ever seen. "They're over there. Practice a bit before moving on." Great advice, farmer. I couldn't ask for more. No story, no explanation of controls, just "practice a bit." This is a waste of the friendly on level one. If this game is being pitched as story-rich, the developer should have given more than an after thought on how to use conversations in Justice for All. Story should be the driving force, or at least interesting context on why I keep going from level to level killing bosses. It's not even up to that latter, lower level, in this game, unfortunately. Motivation doesn't need to be much, but I should care why I'm killing seemingly random armed people and wildlife. Why is the wildlife on the side of the elites, anyway? I didn't think boars were smart enough to choose sides in another species' conflict. They're right there with the bees, fighting one human for another human, though. That's actually stranger to say out loud. Anyway, that's why you need to give your story at least some time in the oven. This one isn't even out of the metaphorical biscuit tube.
The last part of this game that I can comment on is the music and sound effects. They are... competent. What else should I expect from another asset pack, though. The tracks are a credit to their authors, being in line with the game, but not too interesting as to take attention away from the gameplay. The sound effects feel worse, but that's because they don't have the impact I usually expect from shots and explosions. They feel flat, somehow. Like they were meant for either a lighter game or one with a more diverse soundscape where a louder shot or explosion would drown out other important information. Needless to say, I think the designer should have spent more time juicing up their audioscape to make it feel like the player is in an oppressive world, like how Gears of War or This War of Mine do with their scapes. Heck, even look at what Minecraft does in caves. If you're making a fight against oppression, make it feel like it. Not a Kenney assets bubbly platformer, with weak explosions and anemic shots.
The question now must be asked: Is this game rightfully in the no review club? Sadly, I think so. The developer could have had something more if they added more enemy types, focused more on the effects and how they worked together, or leaned more heavily into story, like the game Deadbolt did. Any one of those could have elevated this game, but sadly aren't present in this game. If Charles Wolfe wanted to see other, better implementations of this design, I would try playing some older "cinematic" platformers, like Another World, Blackthorne, the Rolling Thunder series and others. There's a lot to learn here, but most of it goes back to the idea of emphasizing the interesting bits of the game. That means working on the movement and making it feel good. Getting more varied enemies and a better reason to fight them. Making each shot sound impactful and not the first sound effect that could conceivably fit the bill. Justice for All needs all these things to be more than what it is. I hope that Charles Wolfe continues to work on games and learns from this game, but statistically he probably is done publishing on Steam.
That's about all that I'm going to say about this game, though. If you have something you'd like to add, leave it in the comments below, or reach out to me on various social media as @JCSirron. I'd love to hear what you think of this game, this series, or anything game design related. This has been another Adventure Mechanics Side Quest. I'll talk to you next time.
