Author's note:

Ivan is a game I helped make as a part of TeamOG. Here is the review from GMG:

"Ivan, a peppy game created by Team OG, springs to life with an interesting, albeit perhaps not gripping, plot detailing the story of a young “Telemonk” whose entire Clan has been kidnapped. Your job, naturally, is to tail the kidnappers, baddies creatively titled “Evactors,” and stop at nothing short of rescuing your entire Clan while strutting your psychic-stuff against the Evactor menace.

Although the storyline is interesting, and the game is interspersed throughout by well written dialogue, at times, it feels that more concise and abbreviated text would have been better suited to the game’s flavor. Fortunately, the game allows you to skip through text, for those who feel similarly.

Though the storyline presented isn’t particularly unique, the gameplay presented in Ivan hardly follows that trend. Each level is comprised of obstacles, enemies and objects—the objects being items that you can manipulate using Ivan’s telekinetic prowess (his ability to move things with his mind). Because you can manipulate the objects in any way, shape or form that you so desire, the game opens up hundreds of windows of possibility, providing an extremely large array of viable methods to complete any given task. Often, you’ll simply have to get past tricky and well-designed obstacles, but more often than not, you’ll stumble across certain areas that require you to kill all the enemies, or collect a given number of keys, to progress.

Bosses, however, are perhaps the most enjoyable and unique aspect of Ivan. Thanks to the aforementioned window of possibilities for completing any given task, boss battles are as strategic as they are difficult—a statement which should not be taken lightly, seeing as to how Ivan has some incredibly nasty baddies for bosses. The sort of bosses that people can die on 10 times or more easily, although this difficulty does not detract from the fun, thanks entirely to the strategy involved. Fortunately, there is a well-thought out save-point before every boss, allowing you a quick restart for the guaranteed many deaths. Overall, Team OG’s design of the boss battles were exceptionally well crafted, and definitely one of the highlights of the game.

Colorful and cartoon-styled graphics, along with the well composed tracks, make the game quite enjoyable, although, at times, the animations seem a bit stiff and slight errors in graphical transitions between two tiles make themselves apparent. Regardless, these should not be considered flaws to the game for their minority.

On the other hand, real flaws made themselves apparent in the game mechanics. Collisions were quite buggy on some enemies, as dropping a stone or box, which would generally kill them, didn’t quite have that effect—and tended to actually ended up in a collision error that froze the enemy from moving at all. Often, it seemed that moving objects just lacked the convincing fluidity of natural physics; rather than having the box move towards your cursor, the box often “jumped” towards it in a choppy motion. In addition, the telekinetic grapple for lifting Ivan could have easily been polished up further.

Personally speaking, a great addition would have been to make it so that Ivan seemed to “hover” whenever he grappled onto something, and would continue to hover momentarily after releasing the grapple, so as to make grappling another object easier.

Lastly, perhaps the difficulty was a bit too great for likes in some areas. Though Ivan no doubt provides great gameplay, sometimes it appeared the game would have greatly benefited from interspersed checkpoints within levels, or lives, so that players wouldn’t have to restart an entire level if and when they died.

Regardless of these unpolished mechanics and possibly steep learning curve, both of which leave room for improvement, Ivan is still fantastic entertainment, and is a game that must be played through at least once.

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