Bionix: Spore Evolution Sim 3D - B3n's Posts

Games worth discovering

1K View2022-03-11

You probably will not like this game, if you have any shred of respect for your time.

That being said, there is potential here, but the problems holding it back are so frustratingly simple. Mainly that it is just a very, very, very slow and tedious grind. With the core gameplay being a mystery to me still after I've put like 6 hrs into it and just not very rewarding enough to get me to push me through it any further.

If you're like me, your impressions from the screenshots are that you get to play as a small simple-celled organism who eats even smaller, simpler-celled organisms and slowly gains mass and grows and evolves into stronger, more resilient, or nimble forms who can take on increasingly larger, more complex-er celled organisms. Which seems like it could be fun. that's not really what this game feels like though..

If you do get stronger or larger or faster in this game over time, these advancements are so slow and incremental as to almost be imperceptible to the naked eye.

I'm lvl 15 and the same things that killed me when I was lvl 1 can still kill me now. It feels utterly random. At one point I saw another bacteria drifting, just like me, bumping fruitlessly into logs of protein, who, for all other things going against him, looked like he sort of had his shit together. And for a while, I tried to trail him and see if I could study and learn anything from his example, see if he understood this cruel and uncaring microcosmic jungle any better than me. But soon realized his success rate was about as consistent as mine. It didn't take long for him to be torn apart by an opposing flailing amoeba. It really just feels random whether you win a fight here at all. As far as I can tell there's no sort of strategy, you tap various buttons, flail and thrash desperately and hope that you remain alive. Is this meant to emulate a real bacteria's experience? And the sheer hopelessness and randomness which determines its survival? I'm not sure, but the result isn't very fun.

Through my short time drifting around on this thin film of plastic, teeming with an entire boundless universe of life and wonder, while grazing on logs of protein, seeking out more logs of protein, then grazing on those logs of protein, in my short time clashing with (or bumping into over and over) powerful bacterial goliaths, I can't say I ever really had fun. and as you may have been able to tell, I didn't really learn much either.

So if you were interested in either of those two goals, in its current state I would not recommend this game to you. but if you like weird time-wasting novelty games that make you feel like you sufficiently wasted 6 hours of your life? then I can't recommend it enough.

Could easily be a much better experience if they addressed some of this stuff and expanded the concept a little more and weren't afraid to just "game-ify" it a little more rather than sticking so stringently to realism.

2 stars (for the general public)

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