Overall Score 68%
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Tinmen Brown
Tinmen Brown is certainly the smallest game I've reviewed for Bytten, not in file size but in physical screen area. The game is a classic platformer, the aim being to reach an exit on each level by jumping from moving platform to platform without touching various deadly spiky things.
The bitmapped graphics are stylish and well drawn. The title screen is fully animated and the petite nature of the game gives the whole gameplay experience a vaguely Japanese feel. The music is notable too, including some strange muffled speech.
The controls can be assigned to keyboard or joystick and are responsive. Keyboard controls can be redefined and the sound effects can be muted too. The collision detection is particularly nasty with respect to instant death via spikes. Walking into spikes from the side is instantly deadly, as is being hit by a platform moving in the wrong direction. The tiny screen size means that the main character makes up a larger than usual proportion of the level size, and that together with the lavish quantity of instant death makes the gameplay very tentative and sometimes annoying.
Levels can be played from the last level completed. The game is not installed but unzipped and settings are annoyingly stored in the Windows folder without mentioning it.
The game is highly stylish to look at and listen to in way that most games are not, but in playability terms Tinmen Brown did not engage me. In comparison to Jogo Das Trairas, a game in a similar class, this game is less fun to play and the small screen size devalues the game graphically. Holymonkey are carving a niche as the artisans of the indie game but I think that the game play aspect of Tinmen Brown needs a bit of work.
For $5 you can buy all four games in the Tinmen series, sub-titled brown, blue, red and grey respectively. The lite versions include 10 unique levels each and are small so you might like to give them a try.
Keywords: tinmen brown review, holymonkey studio reviews, holymonkey studio games, tinmen brown scores, pc game reviews, indie game reviews, independent gaming.
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