nice

wtf

Cool game with interesting style of gameplay. I would like the attack button to use a club to help with the range but other than that it's a cool game I enjoyed the boss very cool ideas you have. Keep it up!

I adore the death screen, it's just a pool.

Edit: The redirect at the beginning did not happen when I tried to reproduce it, however, the game now pops immediately into full screen. I am unsure if the game glitched or if something was changed. That being said I will continue to include this portion in my review so that if it is happening with other people they can also comment and report as required. I will, however give a 1 point increase in the score and split the difference until I know otherwise.

Police Escaper starts off with a popup presumably to try and get feedback via Google Docs.. I am personally just fine with Newgrounds and not fine with automatic redirects. Isn't that even violating the submission guidelines/TOS?

"Your submission must not auto-redirect to a new site or open pop-ups. If your submission auto-spawns something to boost stats on another site, your account will be deleted and admins for the target site will be notified."

What do you know. It is against the TOS. Granted the purpose is not to boost stats, but it is auto-redirecting. The author should probably change that. Anyhow, -2 stars for the redirect.

The game itself starts off with the wonderfully tedious task of collecting rocks to sell them so you can buy rocks at five times the price just a little while later. As much as I love doing this tedious task I would much rather skip it and just be able to collect the 3 bloody rocks and choose if I will sell them or not. Granted, you don't know that you have to do this when you are in the area where you collect and sell rocks, so if you didn't do it be prepared to retrace your steps.

I will also note here that doors have a down arrow appear over them even though the interact button is up. You may be surprised how often you press down as soon as the arrow appears. It is fun to have the game appear to contradict itself.

So you killed the one dudes ghost neighbor and got 50 money, You may be thinking what can I do next? How can the next part of the game possibly compare with the first? You can go massively into debt to get a pickaxe, that is what you can do. Then you can go mine gold to try and pay off your debt while trying not to die as you run through the enemy camp between you and the gold! And do that over and over! Yep, a second tedious task, I know, you are so excited you have to run off and play this right now. Wait, this review covers all of the game that there is to cover! Just kidding, the game pretty much just ends there. You mine enough gold to pay off your debt and buy enough rocks to kill the weirdos. If you are feeling super industrious you can run to the right across bland fields then jump off the edge of the world. You don't die, but you can pretend that eventually the player goes splat. There, the rest of the review talks about bugs and junk.

Bugs

The first bug you see a good deal of with the weirdos, they tend to walk into walls and get stuck or fall through the floor, at one point it happened to the player character. The game bugged out while I was being stabbed by a giant weirdo while trying to mine gold (he followed me down there). I was able to get the game to load unbugged after restarting the game. So sad, I was going to call it a bust, instead I had to finish playing. On the plus side I had already scouted ahead and there didn't seem to be anything to find.

Another bug you may find yourself thankful for is that you never actually have to buy health potions, just pressing C will heal you. I would like to assume this is actually an intentional bug that was introduced last minute because getting money in this game is like pulling out your own teeth. So at least there is that.

Summary

As mentioned previously the "end" game seems to be nothing more than that you mine enough gold to buy enough rocks to kill the weirdos. At least that seems logical to me, granted I really hesitate to suggest that there is anything logical going on here. If I am wrong please feel free to correct me with some other exciting bland task.

All of this being said the graphics in the game are OK, the movement of the PC and enemies is OK (if you ignore the multitude of glitches). There doesn't seem to be any story (at least it isn't implied in the game) and the tutorial actually looks like a funner game than the game (there also seems to be more actual gameplay in the tutorial).

Final score, lets see, -2 for the redirect, -1 for each tedious task (total -2, though in fairness I rather want subtract 1 for each run on each tedious task), -1 for the wall/floor glitches, +1 for the health glitches, +0.5 for passable graphics and movement. +0 for story. Total score 1.5. Congratulations if you kill the redirect and it is actually a passing score!