The Great Tree - First Impressions

Written by Jake on December 28th, 2007 and posted in Game News
Tags : 2D, action, casual, downloadable, fairy, Indie, pc, reflexive

Reflexive Arcade have just released their latest game The Great Tree. It has a similar vibe to Wik & The Fable of Souls due to the graphics, fairy theme and music, yet the gameplay is more like Feeding Frenzy (well only slightly). I played the preview yesterday and thought it was pretty neat but I need to play it some more before giving my final judgement.

The game has some great looking hand-drawn art cut scenes and the in-game graphics consist of a really nice rendered background over which 3D rendered sprites fly about, plus there are the usual particle effects. Basically you fly a fairy round with the mouse and collect floating pollen which you have to return back to a special location. Meanwhile there are various insects flying around that you have to avoid. The gameplay is simple and thus quick to learn yet has extra elements that make it fun like destroying the enemies with a circular explosions, rescuing friendly bee things, picking up power ups and building up a combo bonus for a higher score.

You also have an upgradable character. Every so often you get special star that you assign to health, strength, magic, agility etc. This is a good feature and I like seeing it in games. Also at the end of the level it tells you if you’ve got the best score for the level - this will be good for people who like to replay the game to beat their own scores.

The intro was way too long, I must have sat there for 5 minutes listening to it before my son impatiently clicked the mouse. My other issue with the intro is that the voice over is an American with absolutely no enthusiam for the role. I have nothing against Amercans of course, but fairies are traditionally a European thing and I think an English voice would have worked better. She also just sounded like someone slowly reading a script - it was bad. This would have been much better as a short snappy exciting intro with a decent actor. I estimate about a zillion% of people will just skip the intro after 5 seconds so all that effort is wasted.

I found that the game interested me more than Aquaria because it got me straight into the action, although maybe they should have introduced a new game element on level 2, not waited until level 3; however Aquaria feels more polished and substantial. Also the “collect ‘em up” gameplay and the “fairy” theme may not appeal to everyone. Once again I question the target market of such a game. I think it’s great that Reflexive produce unusual games like Wik and this one, but I’m not sure how well they sell - anyway I wish the best of luck to them with this one! I’ll be playing the demo some more soon. Let me know what you think.

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