Evacuation

4 Frustrating Awesome
I love puzzle games, 2D Boy’s World of Goo a prime example of simple but addictive game play, it was a bit easy though. Evacuation by Benzido however certainly isn’t easy, in fact I’m finding it down right frustrating. And like Benzido’s previous game QWOP where you control the legs (and only the legs) of a runner I can’t put it down for long. Say about as long as it takes to walk across the room to pick out my laptop embedded in the wall.

In Evacuation you control airlocks on a space ship invaded by big purple aliens. The aim is to get the aliens out of the ship by opening the airlock doors while keeping the crew within. The crux is that opening a door of a particular colour opens all the doors of that colour and so the puzzling begins. The key is to keep the captain alive, other crew can be sacrificed but as long as your dashing captain survives all is not lost.

This however brings me to my major issue with the game and the frustrating part. When you fail a level you lose all your progress and are thrown back to the beginning. This is very brutal for a casual game such as this and I wonder at the developers reasons for it. Certainly there is a replay level function, but it only lets you play the level you just lost until you restart once more at the beginning. It means more often than not I leave the game for more gentler pursuits until I can be bothered retrying previous several levels to get back to the point i was at.

Frustration aside and on to some minor gripes i found the game resolution a little small on my screen so picking out the doors is more fiddly than it could be. The music starts the grate a little, the same five or six 8bit tones repeated at infinitum. You can turn off the sound but then you lose the satisfying doors and girlish screams when you sacrifice a crewman/woman/it for the greater good.

Certainly well worth having a play with, a tiny flash game that punches well above it’s weight!