Download Botz (Windows)

blah 2024-05-12 0 point

posting a review from elsewhere:

Reviews
Reviewer: Corlen Belspar - favorite - March 19, 2024
Subject: Sucked Then, Sucks Now
I had this game from a BearWare CD when I was younger. I think there are 8 levels judging by the number of ranks, but I wouldn't know because the game conveniently always crashes in level 7 across different machines I've owned. Getting that far wasn't satisfactory at all and I only bothered because the game said some kind of interesting "Wild Lands" was the last level.

You get 5 lives and suffer one hit kill contact damage. If you die you have to restart the current level. If you run out of lives, then you have to go back to level 1. One ups are nowhere to be found.

This is like if you made a game using Geocities site builder. The flowers that give you a shield and create an expanding rectangle that kills everyone it touches literally just use the Windows drag and drop highlight when you select multiple files. You can't activate these unless you are at least one movement grid unit away and you shoot the middle of them. Which brings me to the next major issues.

Collisions make me feel like this is a DMT simulator. You can actually make your character teleport above one of the solid tiles if you keep turning a certain way while next to them. If the game lags too much then it becomes too incompetent to breath and check collisions at the same time for shots and enemies which leaves you in a panic not knowing if an enemy running into you at lighting speed is going to kill you or not. Enemy AI is terrible and highly predictable, yet due to how fast they move you still won't be able to predict how they will move. Moving faster is supposed to slow down time via time dilation through basic general relativity There might so some plot element to account for holding everything moving faster when you hold down a move key, but it's probably just Action 52 quality programming that causes repeat keystrokes to make the game update each time.

Due to your ball shots being too tiny, if your center isn't close to the enemy's center, your shots will always miss and then you're just dead with no time to react because of how they must have TAS installed into their AI. The double shot power up is an incredible boon that makes up for your small balls, but like everything else, the creator made this terrible only lasting 3 seconds tops. The BMPs for the solid tile flowers do not tile. Enemies that get shot have the audacity to explode in a way that only the developer's 7 year old son could draw via MS Paint spray tool with default palette colors.

Maximizing the game on a large resolution screen greatly helps with the enemies being like Dio from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, but bare in mind that this game was made back when resolutions like 640x480 were standard for home users.

In the end I think the game is programmed on purpose to always crash in the penultimate level to try to force replay value it will never have. The game will still open and function the same on Windows 10 64-bit like back on Windows 95 which surprised the hell out of me and gets its only star for that accomplishment alone.

UPDATE 3/19/24:
I tested it multiple times, just to give it a fair chance to prove me wrong, and the game specifically and consistently crashes on level 6 after you've destroyed the same amount of enemies.

This game is pretty on par with Ooze from Action 52 that also was so badly made it would crash in the same place before you could even see the screen to enter for a chance to win thousands of dollars.