First Impressions Review: Fox Goes Hunting [Steam]
It’s not very often that little ol’ Aun Tumerok me gets games sent to me to review, and it’s fairly common that when I do, they don’t fall under what I typically cover and what our group seeks to preserve: multiplayer and MMO games. It’s quite the stretch to force this one into what we cover, but it at least has Steam leaderboards which provides a bit of a competitive element between community members. We’ll go ahead and cover it anyway, but do keep in mind there is no co-op or any form of multiplayer here at all.
Thank you for the free Steam key and I wish the developer (Restless Swords) the best of luck with future projects!
User Interface & Initial User Experience
The UI seems to be a very slightly modified default template common amongst Unity titles, especially titles by new developers or developers with severe limitations on resources. The menus work but the text popups, when present, are not centered properly and look a bit jarring. It’s a functional enough UI, though — just not a very pretty one.
The initial experience involves being put into the world with some tutorial notifications which you can turn off. It’s fairly simple to follow the game without instructions, though. It’s basically just an explore and collect items game that appears to be geared towards the younger gamers out there.
Graphics, Sound & Art Direction
The music and sound isn’t correctly balanced and songs don’t loop properly, with the cut off point being obvious. This is a quite a simple issue to fix (the music looping issue). The sound effects sound like low quality stock sound effects that aren’t really fitting for the game. It’s not a terrible music selection but it definitely gets grating, since it appears to be a very limited number of songs that don’t really fit what is going on in the game all that cohesively.
The environments look decent enough, but this is also extremely limited. The fox looks cute, but your camera is locked behind the fox except for the occasional cut scene. The camera is way too close and the lack of any sort of ability to adjust the camera becomes quite frustrating. Get used to seeing your fox’s behind if you are going to play this to the end.
Gameplay & Replay Value
This game has a leaderboard and achievements, so it might appeal to those who enjoy being the top dog on leaderboards or want to 100% as many games as possible. For the more seasoned gamer who wants a quality, immersive, and/or challenging experience, this game will become boring quite quickly. It’s pretty much just a collectathon — and not a terribly interesting one at that. You do have the ability to shoot bullets out of your fox, which makes zero sense and is extremely clunky. You can also easily get stuck on hills, next to trees, etc. Jumping frees you, but getting stuck while running on what appears to be nothing becomes quite irritating quite quickly. Younger gamers won’t be immune to this irritation either, once the novelty of the cute fox wears off.
Overall Impressions
This game feels like it’s someone’s first project. Not just anyone’s first project, but someone with a lot of potential to develop into a talented developer in the future but he or she lacks the experience at this time to capitalize on it. The game itself lacks much coherence and is essentially just some sort of random collectathon with no real purpose behind it other than to climb up the leaderboard, with a strange pseudo-FPS game tacked on that doesn’t play very well. For me, that has never been a sufficient excuse unless the gameplay itself is top tier. That’s not the case here.
At a $5.99 price tag, you can purchase six 99 cent games that are much, much better and will provide more hours of entertainment. Hopefully the game becomes more focused and the mechanics become more refined as additional patches are released.
This game is a definitely pass for the time being, but I’ll definitely revisit it in the future! There’s potential here, and you can do much worse on Steam than this title.
