Albacross is a top down flying game about an albatross trying to survive in a world negatively affected by humans. Accompanied with ethereal music by Modul, you maneuver the bird through a polluted body of water. The objective of the game is to fight through the obstacles, and make it to shore in time to meet your awaiting partner. A solid game that has infinite potential if it were continued. Just in advance, I may be a bit biased because albatrosses are one of my favourite birds.
Hazards include icebergs, garbage, and fishing nets. Health in the game is recovered by flying into a group of fish.
Controls: Controlling the albatross in Albacross is fairly straightforward. The arrow keys move the bird in the respective directions. An issue I’ve noticed right off the bat (albatross?) is that there’s no ability to fly diagonally across the screen. Something very necessary when it comes to dodging objects on-screen. Once the concept of up-down-left-right only gameplay comes across, maneuverability becomes fairly simple. In addition to this, the albatross can fly off-screen endlessly. It’d be nice to have a fixed range of flight on screen so that you don’t crash into objects that aren’t visible. After getting the hang of it, I was able to finish the game without touching any of the hazards. (3/5)
Story: Albacross’s narrative is simple, and the player leaves with a positive message regarding the environment. The tale revolves around a hungry albatross who needs to stray from their partner in order to feed. If the albatross dies in the game, you’re shown a screen of a your silent partner waiting to see you. Besides that, Albacross’ story is pretty light, which is perfectly fine for a vertical flyer. (3/5)
Presentation: This is where Rosemary shows her talents; Albacross’ art, sound, and functionality is rock solid. The sounds of crashing waves, albatross cries, along with the ethereal sounds of Modul (Mark Javor) is satisfying. I found myself leaving the game in the background for quite a bit, just because the nature sounds were that relaxing. Whales, squid, and trapped fish scroll past the screen in a pleasant way (not really the trapped fish, that’s kind of messed up). A definite highlight is the shading. Pixel dots were used as a shadow effect for most objects. To top it off, the 16 bit albatross intro is downright adorable. A gripe that I had after a few play-throughs was that having a static ocean was definitely noticeable. For the sake of immersion though, a few frames of water moving would be the icing on the cake.
Creativity: Off the top of my head, I can’t really name that many games that involve an albatross protagonist scooping up fish while dodging icebergs, and garbage. At the same time, however, the vertical-scrolling-collect-things-and-don’t-get-hit genre is fairly saturated. (3/5)
Overall: In regards to replay value, the game is about a minute or two long with the same layout of obstacles. An endless mode, power-ups and a randomizer would be additions that would easily bring tons of replay value to this game. Albacross is the sort of game that would do amazing if it were fleshed out, and ported to mobile. For now though, Albacross gets 3 Goats out of 5.
Controls: 3/5
Story: 3/5
Presentation (sound, art): 4/5
Creativity (has it been done?): 3/5
Overall Enjoyability: 3/5
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