Button Brothers Review: A solid and fun sketch game

You may not be familiar with the development team "Core Entertainment", and some players have not even heard of it. But it is such a little-known "small team" that developed the "Button Button Up!" Such an excellent work.

Behind the game

Leaving aside the game itself, let's start with the story of how the game was born.

Led by producer Li Yuanyang, the game's production team is called Earth Interactive Entertainment, and most of its members are from Nanjing University of the Arts. The studio was founded in 2013, and The Button Brothers was developed by this group two years after the studio was founded.

At first, the studio did not start to develop its own products, but to undertake some outsourcing work. At this time, the studio mainly presented the appearance of an outsourcing company. Due to the love of the studio members for the game, with their own experience in outsourcing work, under the call of Li Yuanyang, the development team began to develop their own game, and signed up for a GameJam development event called Ludum Dare 34. This move also became a stepping stone to the success of the Button Brothers.

This time, Ludum Dare 34 gave a 72-hour development project with the theme of "Two Button Contorls, Growing." Li Yuanyang directly translated "Button" into "button", and then decided the overall setting of the game: platform jumping + puzzle solving, the protagonist is button anthropomorphic button man. Maybe it's because the team members, who have been together since they were students, have a better understanding and cohesion than a normal development studio. At the end of the game, with relatively high quality, it achieved the 24th place in the global comprehensive ranking, which is also the best result achieved by Chinese people in the event. In 2017, it won the GMGC "Independent Developer Competition" and the Tencent GAD "Game Innovation Competition" gold.

The excellent results of the competition have brought them more resources and channels, and also let them become a popular brand in the independent game circle with an unknown small team attitude. Over the next two years, the studio continued to fine-tune the game, and after several version updates and style changes, it finally officially met players.

The game itself

In this era of pixel wind games flying, "Button Brothers" with its high game quality was born in this work quality uneven environment. This tribute to the work of the FC era game, as the game name "button brothers" shows, the player is a "become fine" button man, need to do is to complete a series of levels to solve puzzles, complete the game, a very typical puzzle class platform jumping game.

FC can be said to have created the golden age of 8-bit color lattice games, and we have to admit that the pixel lattice style is indeed a compromise on the premise of cost and limited hardware. "Button Brothers" is no doubt the same, but the pixel style will never become a limitation of the game's shortcomings, but become a place of pride in the game, open the game to see the game screen will never let you down. The producer of the game, Li Yuanyang, has a very high demand for game art, which is obvious to all. Character movements are modulated very naturally. Details such as the shaking lights in the sewer scene, the broken walls, the plastic yellow ducks floating back and forth in the water are everywhere in the map, and even the detailed actions of the characters standing on the edge of the cliff in Metal Slug are also done, which shows the author's attention to the development of this game.

Friends who have a little knowledge of game production can know that the operation feel of 3D games depends on bone binding and action debugging, and the production of almost all character actions in this game depends on art. Thanks to the excellent game art, the natural and smooth character movements can be achieved, and the hand feel is also maintained at a good level. Although the feel is good, the mechanism is a little awkward. In the game, the character jumps up and then holds down "↑" again, which will allow the character to be "stitched" in the middle of the air, but the premise of this "after jumping" is quite a headache, that is, the character can not be stuck in the air when falling naturally, which will really make the player make a lot of wrong operations.

The size of the single player mode of the game is not small, and the four keys and more than 100 minor keys are enough to support players to play for more than three hours continuously. The difficulty curve is smooth, and the difficulty is slightly higher in the later period, but anyone can basically pass the customs with a little practice, suitable for all ages. There will also be various collection elements in the map, and it may take a while to collect them all and complete the level. Unfortunately, these collection items do not seem to be very important for the player, the general game often takes a lot of effort to collect the props can be exchanged for the equivalent return, and all the collected props in this game can only be exchanged for some "innocuous" ornaments in the jewelry store, fortunately, there are many kinds of ornaments, "sexy buttons, Online dressing is realized.

In terms of gameplay, although the game volume is large, the actual game experience is actually a little boring, and the level is not high in playability. There are not too many types of organs in the game, in addition to some classic platform jump decryption games appear in the mobile platform, sosobin, laser strafing elements, the core mechanism that distinguishes this game from other games of the same type is "blocking laser", that is, players can block the laser light path of the same color as their own, so that other characters can safely pass through. To encourage active cooperation between the two players, even in the single-player part, there will be NPC participation to help the player through. The idea of "color-blocking" is good, but the specific application in the game is too few and the design is simple, which is a bit of a waste of this interesting mechanism. The level design is also designed to solve puzzles one after another, and the rhythm is slightly stable and dull. Fortunately, in the map design, there are interesting designs such as "world famous painting" and "Candle", which alleviate the slightly boring game flow.

Good map design is the biggest motivation for me to finish the level in one breath

The above points can be said to have little impact, and not enough to pull the game from "good" to "average". In addition to all of this, the most disappointing part of the game that has the biggest impact on the experience is the sound of the game, which feels almost fretful. The background music in the game itself is good, but it is out of proportion to the sparse ambient sound volume. Who can stand a single loop in the background that drowns out almost all other sound effects during play?

If you feel the same way I do, then that's fine

Button Brothers is also a classic party game. The cooperative mode and the battle mode are unexpectedly fun, and the game has changed the slow pace of thinking and trying in the single mode, and has directly become tense and exciting. Players can pick up items such as shields, bombs, etc. in the map to attack others or protect themselves, while also needing to keep an eye on the terrain and traps of each map to cause problems for the player, very much like Move or Die. After completing all the levels, calling friends and relatives to "hurt each other" also greatly improves the game experience.

Perfect for parties

It is important to know that no work is perfect, and even the best works at present will have more or less minor flaws. Many big factories can not do their own works to be perfect, not to mention this is the first self-developed product produced by the production team. The current version is already a good puzzle-like platform-jumping game, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Overall, the defects outweigh the flaws and the potential is limitless.